This is one I would watch. We know the Iraqi government has made demands of our military to which I would never have agreed. Like making them subject to Iraqi law and disallowing them to take any action without Iraqi approval beforehand.Yesterday they really threw it in our face. While Secretary of Defense Gates was in country Iraqi forces stormed a camp sheltering Iranian members of an opposition group who had been instrumental in supplying us with intelligence.
It was alleged to be a brutal attack with American forces present. If true, due to Iraqi dictates they had no authority to intervene.
Do I trust the Iraqi government? Not on your sweet life.
What really alarms me is what Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes about the vision Maliki presented while on his recent U.S. visit. The Iraq Education Initiative. On the surface it sounds wonderful. After all education on any level is an American hot button.
What is proposed is the goal of introducing qualified Iraqi students to the ways of the western world and in turn bring what they learn back to their homeland. Maybe.
The plan is to send 10,000 students over the next five years to the US and other English speaking countries on Iraqi scholarships. American institutions will streamline admissions to accommodate these "students" and an English Language Institute in Baghdad will bolster their language skills.
This bothers me on a number of levels. One, our Universities are so strapped they can not even accommodate our own students and two, we haven't seen fit to help those English speaking Iraqis that served as translators for us by giving them entrance into this country.
I hate to dampen enthusiasm for such a program but when the prime minister says,
"We want and seek a strong and solid relationship which is open with the Americans and there are no internal politics of Iraq that prohibit us from having such a relationship with a great country like the United States,"I balk.
When the Iraqis talk about "a great country like the United States" I'm immediately suspicious. I don't believe for one minute they like us at all.
And what a way to get their people into this country, with polished language skills to boot!
Since I'm really not an alarmist , and if you believe that..., I'll take all this at face value and consider how wonderful it is they want to learn all about us. Maybe they'll even learn how to quit hating each other just like we have.
8 comments:
My son, who was over there running a police academy for Iraqis.
He said only the Kurds like us. The Iraqis hate us.
I think I am going to be sick....
push button one for English and button two for Iraqi's
Let's be consistent, though. If a foreign government invaded our country and established military bases here, and their members of the military are exempt from American law...do you think Americans would tolerate that?
When I lived in Italy, an American military pilot accidentally clipped the cable that caused an aerial gondola full of skiiers to plummet to a crash. Italians were outraged that the pilot was tried in a military court and found not guilty. The Status of Forces Agreement protects our military members overseas, but the people in the countries where we have bases hate it. Especially in Okinawa where quite a few girls had been raped by U.S. Marines.
As a former servicemember, I was grateful for SOFA, but if I was a citizen of the country where U.S. military bases are, I would not like it one bit. So, I understand the Iraqis. After all, Blackwater really caused a huge headache for America by their trigger happy wild west flaunting of the law!
They hate us, they hate everything about us. If they come into our country (UK) they dont embrace our culture, we have to embrace theirs which is wrong because the same rule is not applied if we were living in their country.
I did not agree with the war in the first place and certainly not with GB's role in it. Tony Blair was Bush's lap dog feathering his own nest for his own future. Sod the British, sod the soldiers adn their families. Our troops arent even adequately equipt for war because our politicians are too busy using our tax money to pay for second homes, to have their "moats" dredged, paying for toasters worth £100 .....
Get outta town I say!
Sansego, I can't let that go. Your arguments are somewhat ingenuous. It is simplistic to say we would not like invaders. That is a given. However, were we occupied, there would be no choice but to accept the "conquerors" rules.
And as for mentioning criminal behavior by marines, come on! That is inflamatory. Do you mean that no women have been "raped" by Okinawans? And, you neglect to mention that those criminal acts were severly punished by our military courts. CU
I was in the Navy when the case of the Okinawa rapes were going on. The Japanese were very angry about the military presence on that island and that the Marines were not tried in Japanese courts.
If an Okinawan man raped an Okinawan girl, he would be tried in the Japanese court of law. However, its human nature that the outrage would be much worse when a foreigner commits a criminal act against a national citizen in that country and is protected by a foreign government.
I love people who hide behind "anonymous." Very courageous of you, especially to say my statement is inflamatory. I'm consistent and do not believe we should hold double standards. That's hypocrisy. We don't like foreigners on our soil committing crimes without paying the consequences, so why do we look the other way when Americans commit criminal acts in other countries and flaunt local law?
If you cannot understand why the Iraqis hate our occupation and especially what members of Blackwater did that caused all these problems, then you know nothing about human nature. Our world won't get better if we keep holding on to double standards.
I find nothing inflammatory in Sansego's comment. He speaks to the attitudes of the citizenry and I would agree with his assessment of how they feel.
Sansego is right...look at how we feel with those in the United Nations... even their children are exempt. Look how mad we get when one of them or their children get in a car accident and one of our people is killed... and the person is just sent home, with no recourse.
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