Greetings from beautiful downtown Ramadi - 2
More al-Qaeda feeding the MSM at the New York Times. Or maybe just fauxtography.
Because Ramadi really doesn’t look like that.
And if it does, the Iranians must be responsible.
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Comments
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Kinda looks like Detroit, only with people.
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Grim,
Not being snarky here, but the most distinctive feature (or bug!) to me in the Ramadi picture is the number of huge holes made by heavy weapons. Surely, that is not Hangzhou.
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No doubt the heavy weapons’ impact is visible; I was thinking of the state of so many buildings, and the fields of rubble. In China, we often saw families living in such places, having tacked up some canvas or other cloth against the last standing wall of a building.
Hangzhou is the most beautiful city in China, too. If you do an image search, you’ll see the lovely areas — the tourist areas and the tea country nearby. It also has the ETDZ, which is filled with newly constructed buildings that look like standard Western construction (although they are not up to code — wiring catches fire, glass windows sometimes shatter when the winter wind blows, etc). There are also huge sections that look substantially worse than this, in spite of the absence of war and China pouring all the money it can into the city.
My point here has to do with third world conditions. Yes, the fighting hasn’t helped, except by giving Iraq a chance to rise out of the third world. Still, we know for example that Iraq’s electrical grid was on the point of collapse before the war, using generators that were so obsolete that we couldn’t order parts for them and had to machine subsitutes by hand until new generators could be purchased. Other infrastructure is likewise apt to have been neglected — as it was even in China, far richer than Iraq, even in Hangzhou, which is its most beautiful city, even without a war.
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I went to Guangzhou (sp?) once on a long bus trip from Hong Kong. Seemed to be only one paved road, the one we were on, all the way there. Very interesting look at a modernizing China. The trip back was by boat. Lots of places along the way that looked like this.
On another point, the place probably didn’t look like that when we got there, but we didn’t go there to blow the place to hell. Our enemies want the place blown to hell with continuing chaos so we’ll get sick of it and leave. It’s working, I guess. People have our MO down. From Reconstruction after our Civil War, all the way to now, if you stick with it long enough and don’t give up, the Americans will eventually get sick of it and leave. Tediously predictable.
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Reconstruction is, I think, the right model to consider. Are you aware of Grant’s successes at breaking the KKK? It was done — I have to admit that it still shocks me that it worked — largely with lawyers.
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From Reconstruction after our Civil War, all the way to now, if you stick with it long enough and don’t give up, the Americans will eventually get sick of it and leave. Tediously predictable.
I will take the Civil War and WWII as counterexamples that the American people will stick it out IF IT IS WORTH DOING. Turning Vietnam and Iraq into bastions of democracy? People aren’t that easy to fool.
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I’m not sure if I grasp the point of this post.
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“I’m not sure if I grasp the point of this post. ”
Yeah, me too Commissar…
What is it that you are trying to say?
Ramadi is one of the central points of a war. The fact that buildings are in poor repair (almost rubble) says… what???
As others have said, you can go to other countries and find the same or worse conditions.
What is your point? -
“Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” — Ronald Reagan
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Ah. Say what you will about Saddam, he sure kept the bullet holes out the walls.
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I am in Ramadi, so I am getting a kick out of some of these replies…
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Mordis,
Well then, by all means, “please share your views with the rest of the class.”
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Oh, well. Looks like we did at least 10… maybe 20 dollars worth of damage? The place was a dump before we arrived. Hell, the Arty probably made an improvement.
Greetings from beautiful downtown Ramadi
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Let the outing continue …