This morning the Drudge Report features a headline that a Brit has condemmed the U.S. Army as "racist". Of course this headline is sensationalized but the article itself is quite telling about the way we are fighting this war and perhaps why it is going so very badly.
Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster (British Army) was the second higheset ranking officer in charge of training Iraqi security forces. Today an article in the Guardian reprints some of his criticisms about the U.S. Army in Iraq. Among the charges are that our troops are that "at times their cultural insensitivity, almost certainly inadvertent, arguably amounted to institutional racism". This is not much of a shocker to me. The American public is shockingly ignorant of arab culture and the armed forces are a reflection of that. Brig. Aylwin-Foster goes on to write that American troops are exceptionally patriotic and loyal but also overly optimistic. He writes that there is a hesitancy to report bad news up the chain of command because it is unwelcome. I think we know where that one starts...all the way at the tippy-top of the Chain of Command. The article can be read at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1684561,00.html