Skip to main content

Home/ Socialism and the End of the American Dream/ Group items tagged ghost-soldiers

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Paul Merrell

Investigation finds 50,000 'ghost' soldiers in Iraqi army, prime minister says - The Wa... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...4-9721-80b3d95a28a9_story.html

war & peace Iraq U.S.-foreign-policy ghost-soldiers

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • The Iraqi army has been paying salaries to at least 50,000 soldiers who don’t exist, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said Sunday, an indication of the level of corruption that permeates an institution that the United States has spent billions equipping and arming. A preliminary investigation into “ghost soldiers” — whose salaries are being drawn but who are not in military service — revealed the tens of thousands of false names on Defense Ministry rolls, Abadi told parliament Sunday. Follow-up investigations are expected to uncover “more and more,” he added.
  • Abadi, who took power in September, is under pressure to stamp out the graft that flourished in the armed forces under his predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki. Widespread corruption has been blamed for contributing to the collapse of four of the army’s 14 divisions in June in the face of an offensive by Islamic State extremists.
  • The United States is encouraging Abadi to create a leaner, more efficient military as the Pentagon requests $1.2 billion to train and equip the Iraqi army next year. The United States spent more than $20 billion on the force from the 2003 invasion until U.S. troops withdrew at the end of 2011. With entry-level soldiers in Iraq drawing salaries of about $600 a month, the practice of “ghost soldiers” is likely to be costing Iraq at least $380 million a year — though officials say that’s probably only a fraction of the true expense.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “It could be more than triple this number,” said Hamid ­al-Mutlaq, a member of the parliamentary defense and security committee, pointing out that more thorough on-the-ground investigations are planned. “The people who are responsible for this should be punished. Iraq’s safe has been emptied.” The corrupt practice is often perpetrated by officers who pretend to have more soldiers on their books in order to pocket their salaries, experts say.
  • The United States is focusing its efforts on three divisions in order to begin effective counteroffensive operations against the Islamic State, which controls around a third of the country’s territory. The Pentagon also has requested $24 million to train and equip tribal fighters and $354 million for Kurdish forces as part of its strategy to turn the tide against the Islamic State.
Gary Edwards

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Superpower in Distress | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...lare%2C_superpower_in_distress

Iraq ISIS

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • In response, the Obama administration dispatched thousands of new advisers and trainers and began shipping in piles of new weaponry to re-equip the Iraqi army.  It also filled Iraqi skies with U.S. planes armed with their own munitions to destroy, among other things, some of that captured U.S. weaponry.  Then it set to work standing up a smaller version of the Iraqi army.  Now, skip nearly a year ahead and on a somewhat lesser scale the whole process has just happened again.  Less than two weeks ago, Islamic State militants took Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province.  Iraqi army units, including the elite American-trained Golden Division, broke and fled, leaving behind -- you’ll undoubtedly be shocked to hear -- yet another huge cache of weaponry and equipment, including tanks, more than 100 Humvees and other vehicles, artillery, and so on. The Obama administration reacted in a thoroughly novel way: it immediately began shipping in new stocks of weaponry, starting with 1,000 antitank weapons, so that the reconstituted Iraqi military could take out future “massive suicide vehicle bombs” (some of which, assumedly, will be those captured vehicles from Ramadi).  Meanwhile, American planes began roaming the skies over that city, trying to destroy some of the equipment IS militants had captured.
  • Notice anything repetitive in all this -- other than another a bonanza for U.S. weapons makers?  Logically, it would prove less expensive for the Obama administration to simply arm the Islamic State directly before sending in the air strikes
  • In any case, what a microcosm of U.S. imperial hubris and folly in the twenty-first century all this training and equipping of the Iraqi military has proved to be.  Start with the post-invasion decision of the Bush administration to totally disband Saddam’s army and instantly eject hundreds of thousands of unemployed Sunni military men and a full officer corps into the chaos of the “new” Iraq and you have an instant formula for creating a Sunni resistance movement.  Then, add in a little extra “training” at Camp Bucca, a U.S. military prison in Iraq, for key unemployed officers, and -- Voilà! -- you’ve helped set up the petri dish in which the leadership of the Islamic State movement will grow.  Multiply such stunning tactical finesse many times over globally and, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare makes clear today, you have what might be called the folly of the “sole superpower” writ large. Tom
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Delusionary Thinking in Washington The Desperate Plight of a Declining Superpower By Michael T. Klare
  • Take a look around the world and it’s hard not to conclude that the United States is a superpower in decline. Whether in Europe, Asia, or the Middle East, aspiring powers are flexing their muscles, ignoring Washington’s dictates, or actively combating them. Russia refuses to curtail its support for armed separatists in Ukraine; China refuses to abandon its base-building endeavors in the South China Sea; Saudi Arabia refuses to endorse the U.S.-brokered nuclear deal with Iran; the Islamic State movement (ISIS) refuses to capitulate in the face of U.S. airpower. What is a declining superpower supposed to do in the face of such defiance? This is no small matter. For decades, being a superpower has been the defining characteristic of American identity. The embrace of global supremacy began after World War II when the United States assumed responsibility for resisting Soviet expansionism around the world; it persisted through the Cold War era and only grew after the implosion of the Soviet Union, when the U.S. assumed sole responsibility for combating a whole new array of international threats. As General Colin Powell famously exclaimed in the final days of the Soviet era, “We have to put a shingle outside our door saying, ‘Superpower Lives Here,’ no matter what the Soviets do, even if they evacuate from Eastern Europe.”
  • The problem, as many mainstream observers now acknowledge, is that such a strategy aimed at perpetuating U.S. global supremacy at all costs was always destined to result in what Yale historian Paul Kennedy, in his classic book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, unforgettably termed “imperial overstretch.” As he presciently wrote in that 1987 study, it would arise from a situation in which “the sum total of the United States’ global interests and obligations is… far larger than the country’s power to defend all of them simultaneously.”
  • The first of two approaches to this conundrum in Washington might be thought of as a high-wire circus act.  It involves the constant juggling of America’s capabilities and commitments, with its limited resources (largely of a military nature) being rushed relatively fruitlessly from one place to another in response to unfolding crises, even as attempts are made to avoid yet more and deeper entanglements. This, in practice, has been the strategy pursued by the current administration.  Call it the Obama Doctrine.
  • In other words, whoever enters the Oval Office in January 2017 will be expected to wield a far bigger stick on a significantly less stable planet. As a result, despite the last decade and a half of interventionary disasters, we’re likely to see an even more interventionist foreign policy with an even greater impulse to use military force.
  • The first step in any 12-step imperial-overstretch recovery program would involve accepting the fact that American power is limited and global rule an impossible fantasy.
  • Accepted as well would have to be this obvious reality: like it or not, the U.S. shares the planet with a coterie of other major powers -- none as strong as we are, but none so weak as to be intimidated by the threat of U.S. military intervention.
  • Having absorbed a more realistic assessment of American power, Washington would then have to focus on how exactly to cohabit with such powers -- Russia, China, and Iran among them -- and manage its differences with them without igniting yet more disastrous regional firestorms. 
  • fewer military entanglements abroad, a diminishing urge to garrison the planet, reduced military spending, greater reliance on allies, more funds to use at home in rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure of a divided society, and a diminished military footprint in the Middle East.
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Jun 15
     
    Thanks Marbux! "Think of this as a little imperial folly update -- and here's the backstory.  In the years after invading Iraq and disbanding Saddam Hussein's military, the U.S. sunk about $25 billion into "standing up" a new Iraqi army.  By June 2014, however, that army, filled with at least 50,000 "ghost soldiers," was only standing in the imaginations of its generals and perhaps Washington.  When relatively small numbers of Islamic State (IS) militants swept into northern Iraq, it collapsed, abandoning four cities -- including Mosul, the country's second largest -- and leaving behind enormous stores of U.S. weaponry, ranging from tanks and Humvees to artillery and rifles.  In essence, the U.S. was now standing up its future enemy in a style to which it was unaccustomed and, unlike the imploded Iraqi military, the forces of the Islamic State proved quite capable of using that weaponry without a foreign trainer or adviser in sight."
Paul Merrell

The Early Edition: September 9, 2016 | Just Security - 0 views

www.justsecurity.org/...early-edition-september-9-2016

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Iraq boots-on-the-ground Mosul-offensive mission-creep

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • The US has sent 400 additional troops to bolster Iraqi forces preparing to retake the Islamic State-held city of Mosul, report Ben Kesling and Gordon Lubold at the Wall Street Journal.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Sep 16
     
    More U.S. boots on the ground in Iraq and more mission creep. I'll take an informed guess that these will be mostly forward troops whose mission will be coordinating the targeting of U.S. coalition airstrikes. As such, they're likely to experience casualties among them. So much for Bush2's "mission accomplished" and Obama's "no-ground-troops," which is also one of Hillary's campaign promises. The Mosul offensive has been delayed for nearly two years because those billions of dollars we spent "building" the Iraqi Army forces mostly went into the pockets of government officials, with nearly all units consisting mostly of "ghost" soldiers who had no existence other than a name so officers could pocket their pay. But keep in mind that the U.S. goal in Iraq is not to win a war, but instead to keep Iraq and Syria in a state of destabilization, a war without end. That blocks the Iran-Iraq-Syria Friendship Pipeline and serves Israel's empirical ambitions.
Paul Merrell

Cannonfire - 0 views

cannonfire.blogspot.com.au/...-blame-necons-plus-secret.html

ISIL U.S.-foreign-policy neocons al-Baghdadi

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The ISIS phenomenon is as bizarre as it is horrifying. These jihadists (led by a mystery man named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a.k.a. Abu Dua, a.k.a. "The Ghost" -- about whom, much more below) have achieved sudden, dramatic success. Yet nearly everyone in the Islamic world detests them. Although ISIS is often described as an offshoot of Al Qaeda, ISIS managed to alienate even Ayman al-Zawahiri, the man who assumed Bin Laden's "throne." Even fighters for the rival Nusra front -- the Syrian rebels who eat hearts and desecrate churches -- temporarily broke with ISIS, on the grounds that ISIS is too extreme. If you've been paying any attention to the news, you already know that ISIS took over Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, which thousands of people have fled. They have also reportedly taken Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, although some accounts hold that government forces have retaken the city. The situation is so dire that even Iran has offered to help their one-time foes in Iraq. Of course, Shi'ite Iran does not want to see a powerful neighbor ruled by ultra-radical Sunnis.
  • From the Washington Post: Meanwhile in Mosul, one of Iraq’s most important cities, ISIS set about asserting its control, issuing an 11-point charter spelling out the creation of an Islamic state along with new laws, punishments and incentives. Alcohol, cigarettes and drugs are outlawed, citizens will henceforth be required to pray five times a day, thieves will have their hands amputated and women must stay indoors except in cases of emergency, the charter said. “To those of you who ask, who are you? The answer: We are the soldiers of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria . . . who took it upon ourselves to bring back the glory of the Islamic Caliphate and turn back injustice and indignity,” the charter announced. Never forget who is responsible for this disaster: The neoconservatives.
  • As noted above, and as we have seen in earlier posts, the United States insured that weaponry from Libya went to anti-Assad jihadists. Before that, we supported jihadis fighting against Gaddafy of Libya:
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Who is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? Born Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai, he received a doctorate from the Islamic University in Baghdad. In 2003, he is said to have formed a short-lived militant group in response to the American invasion.
1 - 4 of 4
Showing 20▼ items per page