Friend home with nasty dose of reality from Iraq

The word my friend used to describe the situation in Iraq was disaster. While the Bush administration tries hard to control the news we hear, now and then we get to hear some of the truth. Let me tell you, it's not nice hearing the truth completely unfiltered by the government or the media. Most of our troops over there are seriously demoralized and want to come home. Very few match the picture of what we frequently see on the news - proud to serve, dedicated to the mission, loyal to the Commander in Chief. The commanders there are angry that their men are being killed because someone hasn't approved getting them the right equipment. They are upset that they are being asked to take on a mission when they haven't been given the resources they need to achieve victory.

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  thanks to Steve Gilliard's News Blog

Iraq war could cost US over $2 trillion, says Nobel prize-winning economist
· Economists say official estimates are far too low
· New calculation takes in dead and injured soldiers

How Many Iraqis Have Died Since the US Invasion in 2003?
30,000? No. 100,000? No.

President Bush's off-hand summation last month of the number of Iraqis who have so far died as a result of our invasion and occupation as "30,000, more or less" was quite certainly an under-estimate. The true number is probably hitting around 180,000 by now, with a possibility, as we shall see, that it has reached as high as half a million.

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My Military Experience (What Really Demoralizes the Troops)

1. Being Unprepared. There is a sort of gallows humor that one clings to in Iraq. This is especially true when outfitting a Humvee with armor. I've saw some of those Up-Armor vehicles out there. Almost all of the grunts don't have them. They have to ride around with plates attached to their vehicles. This plating is spotty at best. The truth of the matter is it does very little to stop shrapnel in a blast. It will deflect some of it, but it is hardly a substitute for the fully-armored humvees I saw out there. Now we find out 80% of torso-related fatalities could have been avoided had the Pentagon distributed certain plates they had in their posession. It's like being thrown to the meatgrinder. Feeling expendable is demoralizing.h

[more]

  thanks to Steve Gilliard's News Blog