Link to article
Some choice quotes:
Over the years of reporting from Baghdad, I have come to love the place with a kind of angry possessiveness. After the invasion, it always enraged me to hear American officials warning Iraqis that the patience of the United States could wear thin unless they did something to help themselves.
Suggestions that America had sacrificed a great deal to help Iraq, and that everything would be fine if only Iraqis would stop their incomprehensible violence, made me boil with anger.
I have not the slightest sympathy with the vicious criminals who blow up others in the name of religion. But if you invade a complex, finely balanced society and destroy all the constraints which stop people going for each other's throats in the name of politics and religion, the primary blame is scarcely theirs.
"Gooks" are locals: the distinction between insurgents and the civil population that these Americans were supposedly there to protect was as tenuous in Iraq as it had been in Vietnam.
I once wrote a long report for the BBC on why Iraq didn't have to become another Vietnam; yet even while I was writing it, large numbers of tattooed and shaven-headed men, in uniform and out of it, who thought everyone was a gook and a fair target, were making sure that Iraq would be just as much of a disaster, and would leave similar amounts of hatred and destruction behind them when they pulled out.
Much of the problem sprang from the low quality of U.S. Army recruits.
These included a sizeable proportion of Latin American and other immigrants who had joined up in order to gain American citizenship, and there were many who had volunteered because they had a criminal record and wanted it expunged.
Within a year of the invasion, the awkwardness and widespread lack of elementary social skills among these soldiers was beginning to enrage ordinary Iraqis.
The majority of the soldiers treated all Iraqis as enemies, just as their predecessors had once treated all Vietnamese - and then they were surprised to find that most Iraqis did indeed come to hate them.
Opinions on the article?There are no better soldiers to have on your side than Americans if you are fighting an all-out war against enemy troops. They are tough, brave and very committed.
In World War II, they were much more committed than the British Army, and could never understand the British soldiers' habit of surrendering when they ran out of ammunition, fighting to the end with any weapon that came to hand.
But if you are in a war against a shadowy enemy who fire at you from around corners and behind innocent civilians, whose language and habits you have to understand, then it is better not to have the Americans around.
