Progress, Ramadi Style

Joao Silva for the NY Times

The traitorous NYTimes gives us a snapshot today of the hell that is Ramadi. In Ramadi, Fetid Quarters and Unrelenting Battles The marines there must not have gotten the memo about the progress in Iraq and the insurgency's last throes the administration keeps telling us about. Says Captain Andrew Del Gaudio, 30, of the Bronx, (commander of the US unit there), ""We go out and kill these people. I define success as continuing to kill the enemy to allow the government to work and for the Iraqi Army to take over." The outlook is grim:

That day seems a long way off. The Iraqi government exists here in little more than name. Last week about $7 million disappeared from the Rafidain Bank — most of the bank's deposits — right under the nose of an American observation post next door. An Iraqi police officer was shot in the face and dumped in the road, his American ID card stuck between his fingers.

The governor of the province, Mamoun Sami Rashid al-Alwani, still goes to work here under an American military escort. But many of the province's senior officials deserted him after the kidnapping and beheading of his secretary in May.

The previous governor was assassinated, as was the chairman of the provincial council, Khidir Abdel Jabar Abbas, in April. At a meeting of the provincial cabinet last week, only six of 36 senior officials showed up.

"The terrorists want to keep Anbar people out of the government," said Taha Hameed Mokhlef, the director general for highways, who went into hiding last month when his face appeared on an American-backed television station here showing him in his job. He has since re-emerged. "My friends told me that the terrorists were planning to kill me, so I went to Jordan for a while," he said.

~snip~

One of the "habits of mind" drilled into the marines from posters hung up inside: "Be polite, be professional and have a plan to kill everyone you meet."

The humor runs dark, too. On a sheet of paper hung up in the Government Center, marines wrote down suggestions for their company's T-shirt once they go home. Most are unprintable, but here is one that got a lot of laughs: "Kilo Company: Killed more people than cancer."

The marines at the Government Center have held on, but the fighting has transformed the area into an ocean of ruin. The sentries posted on the rooftops have blasted the larger buildings nearby so many times that they have given them nicknames: Battleship Gray, Swiss Cheese. The buildings are among those that will be bulldozed under the Green Zone plan.

Long story short, after 3 years, the US forces are no closer than ever to pacifying Anbar province.

And yet the republican leadership continues to bleat, "stay the course! stay the course!" like a bunch of brain-dead sheep. Feh.