7 Responses to

1. Jon says:

   September 8, 2006 at 19:21

   My pro­pa­ganda alert is going off. Let’s ana­lyze this thread and see if Lady­bird is right to be in a tizzy.

   “US PR machine des­per­ately try­ing to show the world that they are mak­ing progress in Iraq.”

   The DoD arti­cle was very clear and hon­est about exactly what happened.

   “The US forces handed con­trol of Iraq’s armed forces over to the country’s government.”

   From other pre­vi­ous arti­cles, we already know that the han­dover will take about 18 months to two years.

   In fact, we already know that there were three units handed over, but you for­got to men­tion the 8th Iraqi army divi­sion. The 8th is, of course, the most impor­tant unit for Iraq, con­sid­er­ing the fact that insur­gents don’t have any naval or avi­a­tion capa­bil­i­ties to speak of.

   An army divi­sion is the largest of oper­a­tional units. It con­sists of between 10 to 15 thou­sand men. The Iraqi 8th con­sists of four brigades of infantry plus sup­port units. So, Iraq already has he insur­gency out­num­bered.
   http://www.grd.usace.army.mil/news/releases/recon1012906.html

   There are nine more Iraqi divi­sions con­tin­u­ing train­ing and which will be handed over in the com­ing months.

   “Islam­memo inves­ti­gated the sub­ject from a retired Iraq colonel, who had served as Direc­tor of Baghdad-North oper­a­tions, and was dis­missed from his posi­tion because he was accused on leak­ing infor­ma­tion to the resistance.”

   Yes, he was fired for col­lab­o­rat­ing with the ene­mies of Iraq. I’m sure they could have found a more reli­able source, unless, of course, this Islammemo’s real objec­tive is to show the sit­u­a­tion in the dark­est pos­si­ble light.

   “Retired (you mean fired) Colonel told the cor­re­spon­dent that the mat­ter of fact the Amer­i­can occu­pa­tion forces handed over the two military-unites is an attempt to deliver good infor­ma­tion to the Amer­i­cans about the Iraqi sit­u­a­tion because of the increas­ing US casu­al­ties in Iraq.”

   What does this para­graph even mean? It doesn’t make any sense. The han­dover is about the even­tual draw-down of US forces in Iraq and this will occur more and more as Iraqi forces develop the abil­ity to han­dle their own security.

   “Navy Iraqi naval force is vir­tu­ally non-existent force, except 7 small patrol boats.”

   You do real­ize that Iraq only has 36 miles of coast­line, right?

   This naval unit, known as the Iraqi Coastal Defense Force, is more akin to what Amer­i­cans would call a Coast Guard. It con­sists of over 800 sailors and marines divided into two flotil­las with 6 pla­toons of marines. With very lit­tle coast­line and zero need to project power, this is plenty of naval force for Iraq for now, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that there is a US car­rier bat­tle group in the Per­sian Gulf keep­ing ship­ping lanes open. Add that to the boomer sub we know is lurk­ing on the floor of the gulf and that is more mil­i­tary power than in all of Iran com­bined with many other Mid­dle East­ern nations.

   “Air Force The fact is, the Iraqi air force does not exist in the skies of Iraq except for one mil­i­tary trans­port air­craft used to trans­port sol­diers, donated by the Pen­ta­gon to the Iraqi defense min­istry, and the main­te­nance is still led by an Amer­i­can spe­cial­ist team.”

   The Iraqi air force con­sists of four air­lift squadrons and one recon­nais­sance squadron to func­tion as sup­port of the Iraqi army and coast guard. It is not much of an air force to be sure, but now that all of these units are under Iraqi con­trol, the Iraqis are free to grow them as desired.

   What Lady­bird prob­a­bly doesn’t under­stand is that an air force is an extremely expen­sive branch of any mil­i­tary. It would be unwise to over­bur­den the fledgeling Iraqi gov­ern­ment with major expenses until they have their foot­ing. And, as I men­tioned before, there is a car­rier bat­tle group off the coast will­ing and able to strike down any air threat that Iraq might face. Even when sov­eren­ity has been com­pletely trans­ferred over to Iraqi author­i­ties, the US Navy will be keep­ing the Mid­dle East­ern skies peaceful.

   “P.S. Actu­ally the Colonel was very gen­er­ous to say 7 boats because offi­cially and the US reported there are only 5 boats, 800 sol­diers and some few naval pieces back from the Soviet era [see Wikipedia].”

   Actu­ally, Wiki says that Iraq has forty boats. That’s more than one per mile of coast­line. It’s not clear from Wiki whether the Assad-class corvettes had been released to Iraq yet, but when they are, that will make forty boats and two ships. That’s pretty good for only 36 miles of coastline.

   I think you’re get­ting your panties in a bun­dle over noth­ing, LB. Maybe you should take some deep breaths and try to relax.
2. Saad D. Al-Saidy says:

   September 9, 2006 at 00:18

   God bless u Jon for the cor­rect­ness of your analysis.

   But let me clar­ify some­thing here about the Iraqi Navy.
   In fact ALL of Iraq’s navy boats were destroyed in the 1991 war. What was left was maybe a non-combatant Soviet-era pro­vi­sions boat… Even the coastal patrol boats were used by Sad­dam in the 1991 war as attack ves­sels against .…the Amer­i­can & British naval forces!!!

   As for the five so-called Assad class (or what­ever), these orig­i­nally were Italian-made corvettes ordered by Sad­dam to replace his Soviet era boats. They were never deliv­ered due to the 1992 embargo fol­low­ing the Kuwait affair.

   As for the other 4–5 small coastal guard boats, these were ordered by Sad­dam also but from China prior to the 2003 war. They were wait­ing in a UAE dry dock prior to the inva­sion (fol­low­ing an Amer­i­can request maybe). But now they r serv­ing in the Iraqi “navy”.

   One last thing: The fun­ni­est thing about the hand-over is not only the ques­tion of the 8th Div, but also of the 10th Div. This one is posi­tioned in the south­ern provinces: Bas­rah, Amara, & Nasiriyya. & also other div. in the North. How come these were never men­tioned in the hand-over nei­ther by Casey nor by LB’s very reli­able source of a Colonel???
3. Jon says:

   September 9, 2006 at 01:40

   “God bless u Jon for the cor­rect­ness of your analysis.”

   No prob­lem. I do what I can. ;-)

   Thanks for the updated information.

   “The fun­ni­est thing about the hand-over is not only the ques­tion of the 8th Div, but also of the 10th Div. How come these were never men­tioned in the hand-over”

   Are these other two divi­sions under the con­trol of the Iraqi author­i­ties or just oper­a­tional? If just oper­at­ing, maybe that is why. The 8th is now under the total con­trol of the Iraqi authorities.

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5. Saad D. Al-Saidy says:

   September 10, 2006 at 00:23

   To Jon,

   Yes, I have learned fur­ther info on the Hand-over & the rest of the story. In fact, the total H-O con­cerned only the 8th, while all the other divi­sions (nine more accord­ing the tan­dem Iraqi govt & Am.!) are on the wait­ing… Their turn will be for later.
   All news about this stuff is Top Secrecy. We Iraqis were try­ing hard to get what news we can on this topic. But the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary are just keep­ing a very tight grip on the info tap.

   The info on the Navy i.e. I got it long ago from dif­fer­ent sources, & lately from the internet.

   Any­way I’m not really sure how INDEPENDANT can these Iraqi Army divi­sions be. Surely the Amer­i­cans will keep a con­trol­ling grip on them some­how.
   Two years ago I came to read a piece of news about the sole I. Ar. Brigade that was recon­sti­tuted. It con­sisted of only 3 com­bat bat­tal­ions. As for the rest, mean­ing the ammu­ni­tion & food reg­i­ments, these were never con­sti­tuted. In fact it were the Am. Ar. that pro­vided these!!!

   So it will be the great­est of jokes if the Iraqi govt. pre­tends that these reg­i­ments r independant.

   But all this is lit­er­a­ture com­pared to the most impor­tant: Under what terms I won­der did the Am. hand a highly organ­ised com­bat force to the Iraqi gov­ern­ment? The first H-O cer­e­mony was due last Sun­day to be car­ried out. It was post­poned due to dis­agree­ments on a detail in the arti­cles. So what were the dis­agreed details about & what r the new ones?

   As u can see I deeply dis­trust the Amer­i­cans on any of this. & I’m not alone.
6. Jon says:

   September 10, 2006 at 01:05

   I think that what you can trust is that the US is try­ing to offload Iraqi secu­rity onto the Iraqis as rapidly as pos­si­ble. While there may be a US pres­ence of some sort in Iraq for a while to come, I believe the US mis­sion in Iraq will be over before Bush is out of office.

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