More on the Reservist "Mutiny"

[tw]

Most news services report the arrival of a (maybe) 100 megawatt GE electric generator to south Baghdad. However, more telling is why reconstruction has all but halted in Iraq. Just to protect the workers, all this is required:

Inching Along, One More Piece to Rebuild Iraq from NY Times of 17 Oct 2004
Originally scheduled to be producing electricity by December, the generators are not expected to be ready until June. The pace slowed and security costs soared after the insurgency broke out across the country in April. Two months later, three General Electric employees were killed by a suicide bomber while riding in a convoy in Baghdad.

Now the work site, which employs some 260 Iraqis, resembles Fort Knox, as one Bechtel employee put it. (Fearing reprisals, the company asked that none of its employees be named, and that no photographs showing landmarks around the compound be taken.) The site is surrounded by high concrete blast walls, and there is a bunkerlike inner perimeter where project managers work.

Whenever a Westerner ventures from the inner perimeter and mingles with the Iraqi workers, he is accompanied by rifle-toting guards from ArmorGroup, another private security company. In addition, the site is protected by about 80 of the Nepalese guards known as Ghurkas. There are guard towers, checkpoints and sandbagged refuges for protection in case of a mortar attack.

Like the Western managers and engineers, all of the security personnel must be fed and housed at the site. "Security threw this project all out of whack," said a Bechtel official working inside the compound. "There's no telling what it's going to cost." He cautioned, however, that not all of the cost increases could be attributed to security. Officials involved with the reconstruction say they are in negotiations with General Electric over cost increases.

Now lets see. Those SC National Guardsman were suppose to take the same roads, right past that electric generation site, then pass through Baghdad, and then transverse about one half the Sunni Triangle - without even air cover. Clearly they were anti-American for complaining. Welcome to Vietnam when troops were ordered to do the same stupid things - and openly revolted. This occured often in Nam because there was severe incompetance directly traceable even up to the presidential level. Well, at least that president (that Lookout123 intentionally distorts by having us blame Johnson) read his own memos.