Gen. Ray Odierno, Gen. Petraeus, and President George BushFrom The Intel Dump -- Washington Post
Yesterday, General Ray Odierno took over the command of Multi-National Force-Iraq from General David Petraeus, who is leaving to become the head of Central Command. Odierno is one of the most controversial figures of the Iraq war, and he is taking over at a time of immense complexity.
In 2003 and 2004, Odierno was a two-star general in command of the 4th Infantry Division (4th ID). The division "owned" much of the "Sunni Triangle," including such insurgent hotbeds as Tikrit (Saddam Hussein's home town) and Samarra (the future site of the Golden Mosque bombing that kick-started Iraq's civil war in 2006). Odierno's troops were notorious for their heavy-handed tactics: They conducted indiscriminate sweeps of Sunni towns, arrested thousands of Sunni men, and were often accused of excessive force. The division's approach was devastatingly critiqued by Dexter Filkins in the New York Times Magazine, and Tom Ricks' 'Fiasco' described the division as the poster child for a failed "search-and-destroy" approach to counterinsurgency that focused on killing and capturing the enemy instead of protecting the population.
Read more ....
My Comment: His success will be our success .... his failure will be our failure.
No comments:
Post a Comment