Families Returning Home to Baghdad
An AP via Yahoo story no less…
The 40-year-old al-Azawi, who has gone back to work managing a car service, said relatives and friends persuaded him to bring his family home.“Six months ago, I wouldn’t dare be outside, not even to stand near the garden gate by the street. Killings had become routine. I stopped going to work, I was so afraid,” he said, chatting with friends on a street in the neighborhood.
When he and his family joined the flood of Iraqi refugees to Syria the streets were empty by early afternoon, when all shops were tightly shuttered. Now the stores stay open until 10 p.m. and the U.S. military working with the neighborhood council is handing out $2,000 grants to shop owners who had closed their business. The money goes to those who agree to reopen or first-time businessmen.
Al-Azawi said he’s trying to get one of the grants to open a poultry and egg shop that his brother would run.
“In Khadra, about 15 families have returned from Syria. I’ve called friends and family still there and told them it’s safe to come home,” he said.
This matches what StrategyPage has been saying for awhile, most recently here, in a story about the recent cave whining attributed to OBL and broadcast by al-Jazeera – which is now in hot water with jihadis for broadcasting the tape..
Bin Laden doesn’t discuss how the Americans defeated him. It was done with data. Years of collecting data on the bad guys paid off. Month by month, the picture of the enemy became clearer. This was literally the case, with some of the intelligence software that created visual representations of what was known of the enemy, and how reliable it was. The picture was clear enough to maneuver key enemy factions into positions that make them easier to run down.
One of the greatest strengths of the American military has been its relatively flat command structure, and a professional NCO corps that is able to function autonomously. This has given it the ability to change tactics quickly and learn from mistakes. What works makes it way quickly through the organization, while a culture that tolerates a level of failure allows risk taking for sergeants to experiment. If it sounds like the entrepreneurial culture found in large, well-run companies – it should because in essence that’s exactly what it is.
This is probably the single biggest change between the US military of 2007 versus that of 1967 and especially that in World War 2.
Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, can’t fail – and can’t lose because God is on it’s side, and failure is about as tolerated as well within that organization as the mob. No wonder OBL, or more likely, someone channeling OBL from beyond the grave is sitting in a cave pouring out his heart into a tape recorder.
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