Eye Rakis in Action
Embedded blogger Ardolino talked about ghost soldiers, the problem of Iraqi Army corruption. Eye Raki has some vid here that shows the other side of the equation: The Iraqi Army doing what they are supposed to do, and the muj doing what they do. View of the war from a pro-U.S. Iraqi perspective. Some of it is pretty chilling.
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Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:39 pm on Monday, January 22, 2007
3 Responses to “Eye Rakis in Action”
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January 23rd, 2007 at 4:49 am
How does one handle the culture of corruption? We just keep pouring money into the country. How much of that money goes to finance the enemy?
January 23rd, 2007 at 11:40 am
It’s not going to be an easy or overnight thing to overcome culture that’s thousands of years old. It requires a massive PR “re-education” campaign, and the informational structure just isn’t there yet. All we can hope to do is stabilize the country enough that the Iraqis can build a viable, prosperous economy that will allow them to distinguish the benefits of a stable, mostly honest, democratic government compared with what they’ve always had.
January 23rd, 2007 at 8:47 pm
There are plenty of good IA soldiers, but there really is a problem at the higher levels with accountability. The earlier report that you posted is spot on, we were never 100% sure how many IA soldiers were on the payroll of the IA BN that shared the FOB with us and it was believed that some officer somewhere was skimming money from the payrolls for “ghost soldiers”. Also, we constantly had to give the IA soldiers bottled water because the pallets and pallets we delivered to them were being loaded up and taken out to be sold on the economy by some corrupt officer. All told though the IA soldiers were making progress when we left (October 2005) and they are the only real hope Iraq has for a stable future.