The present-day U.S. military qualifies by any measure as highly professional, much more so than its Cold War predecessor. Yet the purpose of today’s professionals is not to preserve peace but to fight unending wars in distant places. Intoxicated by a post-Cold War belief in its own omnipotence, the United States allowed itself to be drawn into a long series of armed conflicts, almost all of them yielding unintended consequences and imposing greater than anticipated costs. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. forces have destroyed many targets and killed many people. Only rarely, however, have they succeeded in accomplishing their assigned political purposes. . . . [F]rom our present vantage point, it becomes apparent that the “Revolution of ‘89” did not initiate a new era of history. At most, the events of that year fostered various unhelpful illusions that impeded our capacity to recognize and respond to the forces of change that actually matter.

Andrew Bacevich


Friday, March 9, 2012

War News for Friday, March 9, 2012

The DoD is reporting the death of Spc. Edward J. Acosta who died in La Jolla, California, U.S. On Monday, March 5th. He was wounded in a roadside bombing in in Wardak province, Afghanistan on Saturday, December 3rd 2011.


Wounded Soldier Defies Odds

War radioactive contamination threatens Iraqis in Maysan Province

U.S. and Afghanistan Agree on Handover of Prisoners


Reported security incidents
#1: One child was killed, and a woman and a child were injured when a mortar shell hit a house in the Bara area of Aka Khel, in northwest Pakistan's Khyber tribal region, security officials said.

#2: Militants attacked a Pakistan Army post in the Sarwakai area of the South Waziristan tribal region, near the Afghanistan border, killing a soldier, security officials said.

#3: Three people including a pro-government figure were shot dead by gunmen in northern Afghan province of Kunduz Thursday night, a district official said Friday. "Unknown armed men opened indiscriminate fire on the vehicle of a local elder namely Ali Mohammad in Sarak-e-Naw area of Khan Abad district late on Thursday killing Ali Mohammad and two of his comrades on the spot," administration chief of Khan Abad district, Nizamuddin Nashir told Xinhua. The official said Mohammad was a former Mujahidin commander and was working in a commission in charges of recruiting locals for local police force in Kunduz province, some 250 km north of capital city of Kabul.


DoD: Spc. Edward J. Acosta

1 comments:

Dancewater said...

US Army's top soldier talks victory in Iraq

By now, the results of the Iraq War are more or less clear. The numbers alone tell a rather unambiguous story. Hundreds of thousands of casualties through violence or indirect causes like the destruction of the public health system, a lack of access to urgent medical care, and malnutrition, according to the best estimates available. Some 1.3 million internally displaced by the war and 1 million others who fled to now civil war-torn Syria. A jump in the number of Iraqis living in slum conditions from 17 per cent before the American invasion to 50 per cent as of last year, with 7m of Iraq’s population of 30m living below the poverty line. The grim statistics go on and on.

And what it took to get to this level of success is equally well-documented. The myth of David Petraeus’ so-called surge aside, the key to tamping down the violence to what the US considered an acceptable level was handing over large quantities of cash to the insurgents who had been killing Americans for the previous several years. About $360m was paid out in one year alone, transforming yesterday’s terrorists into “true Iraqi patriots”, as one American general put it.

On the day I spoke to Sergeant Major Chandler, Iraqi insurgents unleashed a coordinated wave of small-arms attacks and car bombings across the country, with the worst of the violence centred in the country’s capital, Baghdad. More than 140 people were killed or wounded in the attacks, which targeted police officers, security convoys and government buildings. “Iraq will be like this for 10 or 15 years,” 52-year old Abdul Razaq al-Zaidi, one of those injured in the attacks, told the New York Times. “We are used to it. This is a part of our lives.” It wasn’t, however, before the American invasion.

It was in the hours before Iraqis headed into that day’s charnel house that Chandler and I spoke.