Starving the Americans Out
Someone in the Green Zone leaked the following memo, which shows that US personnel are now actually facing difficulties in getting food by convoy up from Kuwait. They avoid local food in the Baghdad region because of the danger guerrillas will poison it.
'Due to a theater-wide delay in food delivery, menu selections will be limited for the near future. While every effort will be made to provide balanced meals, it may not be possible to offer the dishes you are used to seeing at each meal. Fresh fruits and salad bar items will also be severely limited or unavailable.'
The informant adds his own comment:
The bottom line is that our troops depend on a ground supply line that runs from Kuwait to the various bases in Iraq. When I was in Iraq last year at the U.S. base in Balad I had the chance to eat four meals a day--breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight rations (midrats). If you like late nights the midrats were great--steak, eggs, pancakes. Pretty good food. Well, based on this memo, it looks like those were the good old days. We don't have enough convoys to give our troops three hot meals a day. '
See also Pat Lang's comments.
The veracity of the memo has been challenged at some rightwing sites, but whatever the justice of their complaints about the logo (which may not be original and may have been in fact put there to disguise the source of the leak), the US Embassy memo has been confirmed in the Washington Post.
posted by Juan Cole @ 5/23/2007 05:24:00 AM
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14 Comments:
Steven Gilliard wrote about this years ago. He predicted it.
What a mess.
William Lind, in an essay last month, explored this very logistical problem, and following Tony Dodge's "helicopter landing pad" caution, outlined a evacuation contingency planning for local base commands
off topic ~ But i was so stunned by this report, Hersh: Bush administration arranged support for militants attacking Lebanon : “American policy in the Middle East has shifted to opposing Iran, Syria, and their Shia allies at any cost, even if [that would result in indirect U.S.] backing hardline Sunni jihadists...
...a key element of this policy shift was an agreement among Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy National Security Advisor Elliot Abrams, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national security adviser, whereby the Saudis would covertly fund the Sunni Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon as a counterweight to the Shia Hezbollah.”
...!
further, note : “Hezbollah backs Lebanon army in standoff with [the] Sunni militant group — despite the fact that Hezbollah has been pushing to topple the Lebanese government.”
KBR's website is seeking truck drivers, well, by the truckload. Are they losing people? And then with the British vacating the south soon, probably gonna get worse.
My son spent a year in Iraq and is expecting to be redeplyed soon. He said he ate corn dogs and hot dogs every day- I asked why? " Because I knew what they were"
The bridges that have been blown up recently in Baghdad, would that have any effect on delivering supplies by land to the Green Zone?
Like David points out, when the Brits (and Danes) leave in the south, this is going to improve overland logistics?
A friend's son has just defied his peacenik upbringing to join the military; he has orders for Baghdad in the fall. His mother is heartsick. These reports just make me ill, too. The kid is confident this is what he wants to do; I can only imagine the agonies his mother is going through.
I think she's not allowing herself to read this sort of report any longer. I wouldn't, in her place.
Bush probably decided to let a few troops go hungry so he can now accuse Pelosi and Reid of 'starving our troops'.
With 4 bridges knocked out over the Tigris @ Baghdad in the last month, no surprise...
I doubt the reality of that memo.
- I have never seen another "staff memo" from the Green Zone. There are several thousand US people there. There should have been leaks of lots of them, even if they were of the innocuous but funny sort. (We used to get lots of all-hands memo's, which is what the US Navy would call this, and some were unintentionally quite funny.)
- The logo doesn't look that professional to me. The USG is big on professional logos.
- When I worked for the military, notices like this went out by text email.
- "Theater wide" is awfully... wide. It's not just Baghdad. So, every civilian we have in the entire country is on short rations ? Seems unlikely.
- Conversely, "Mission employees" sounds like employees of the US Mission or Embassy, which is not theater wide. I would expect a more bureaucratic description of who is affected here.
- Who is it from ? Again, when I worked for the DOD, something like that would have had its origin very carefully delineated. It would be from the CO, or the XO or someone specific, and that would be spelled out right at the top.
- The US and foreign Press lives, and, more pertinently, eats in the Green Zone too. They would know about this, and I would expect to see something about it in The Independent at least.
I am sure that logistics will be what drives us out of Iraq if we do get driven out, and I was very impressed ages ago with Steve Gillard's reading of the situation, but that I am not too confident about that memo. Many of the above points could be explained away, but their cumulative effect makes me doubtful.
After reading the post about the delay in food shipments, I found in my mail an invitation to a departure ceremony for the National Guard unit I retired from 7 years ago. Its a Engineer HQ that normally commands and controls collections of engineer battalions and companies for a corps. The Army has a whole system for organizing each type unit at various echelons for conventional warfare.
Now since I have been retired I have been out the loop on operational details. I don't understand the U.S. order of battle for the occupation. It seems ad hock and I am sure the media butchers the unit names and hierarchy in its reporting.
I confirmed that the unit is deploying to Iraq. At first I considered the possibility that would be replacing whoever has been performing engineer command and control functions so they could go home. Then a second possibility came to mind. Maybe they are part of the surge.
I expect a good amount the surge will now be devoted to securing the supply routes from Kuwait. They are also the escape routes for the ugly contingency of a forced withdrawal of U.S. forces.
"The bottom line is that our troops depend on a ground supply line that runs from Kuwait to the various bases in Iraq."
The OBVIOUS solution is to "fight them there so we don't have to fight them here"... i.e. MOVE the various bases to Kuwait so they don't have the long ground supply lines. There were no terrorists in Iraq until we invaded and occupied. Move the bases. The terrorists will follow.
Slides 5 and 6 at the floowing links show the dining facilities as of 2005
http://www.aca.army.mil/docs/Announcement/Contingency%20Contracting/LOGCAP%20ChartsBrief_Apr21-05_Trautner.ppt
More troops = more meals need to be served = more convoys.
It's in the Wapo fercrissakes!:
Taste of Home Runs Low in Iraq
Complications Hold Up Embassy Food Convoys
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 24, 2007; Page A26
[Here]
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