Dying for A Job with the ING By Gary Brecher (war_nerd at exile.ru)
Guess how many Iraqi National Guard troops have been killed in the war. Whatever your guess was, you might be right -- because nobody knows how many of those poor suckers have died. It's weird. If you to the Iraq Coalition Casualties website http://icasualties.org/oif/ you'll get an exact count on how many US soldiers and Marines are dead so far. You can get the count broken down by home state, date of death, location in Iraq, whatever you want. You can even find out how many civilian contractors have been killed (at least 157 when I checked).
And thanks to a leaked report from the Iraqi Health Ministry, we have some figures on how many Iraqi civilians have died: about 3,500 in the last six months. That's a minimum, and sounds pretty low to me. Another 14,000 or so have been injured. The Ministry says these stats include "an unknown number of ING troops and police." So even they aren't keeping track. It's a tough life, being a native auxiliary. You don't even make it onto the casualty lists.
One of the problems with making an exact count of ING casualties is that hundreds of men have died when they were waiting in line outside ING offices, trying to join. Do they count or not? After all, they weren't really in the force yet. "Applicant rejected on grounds of death." These poor guys keep flocking to the recruiting offices, and the insurgents just keep bombing them. On September 25, six ING recruits were killed as they walked out of an ING recruiting office in Baghdad. There they were, with about 30 seconds seniority toward their pension plan, when a car full of masked jihadis pulled up and sprayed them with rifle fire and RPGs. Some poor secretary had probably just finished putting their files in order, and now she had to write up their job termination reports.
But they were lucky; at least they made it inside the office for the interview. Hundreds of guys have been blown away just standing in line waiting to fill out the forms. In Baquba last July, a car bomber drove into a crowd of 500 men waiting to apply for ING jobs and blew up. He killed 70 of them. On July 17, a car bomb killed 30 applicants outside an ING office; on July 19, 10 dead outside another ING office... and the beat goes on. Damn, with all the billions we're putting into Iraq, you'd think we could spring for a few kevlar waiting rooms outside these ING HQ's.
It has to be the worst way in the world to die, while you're applying for a job. It's bad enough worrying if your tie's straight, or what to say if they ask where you see yourself five years from now -- but you have to keep an eye out for Pontiacs full of nitro coming around the corner too. "Um, I'm a very hard worker, and -- shit, what was that noise?"
The insurgents have added a new wrinkle lately: the Copymat killing. At least twice, suicide bombers have targeted photocopying shops near ING recruiting offices. Apparently all the recruits go in there to get their resumes copied -- in color, double-sided, you want to really stand out -- and somebody in the insurgency figured out that you could just send in a pedestrian in a dynamite vest, without having to waste a car. Pull the string and kaboom, the pool of new applicants is instantly smaller. Just a few days before the Sept. 25 attack, a copy store right next to the ING station that got car-bombed was hit. Six men, all ING applicants, were killed.
And yet a couple of days later there were dozens of them standing in line, making a perfect target for Christine the Death Car.
It does make you wonder, are these guys stupid or are jobs really that hard to come by in Iraq? I don't really think they're stupid. If there's one thing the insurgency is showing us, it's that Iraqis are a lot smarter and tougher than we gave them credit for. People don't realize how hard guerrilla war really is. It's not easy hitting the enemy in a crowded street, when he has all the air power and armor. And they're doing it with precision. One of the scoops in that leaked Health Ministry report is that our air raids are killing twice as many civilians as the insurgents' attacks are.
So why would smart people take a suicide job in the ING?
I think it's a couple of things: first, jobs really are hard to get in Iraq. There is no Iraqi economy. Sure, there's oil, but my dad always said the only time oil brings a lot of jobs is in the beginning, when they're building the pipeline. Once it's running, jobs get scarce. The only locals who get rich off a pipeline are the crooked bureaucrats.
And thanks to Saddam, Iraq's been out of the world economy loop for generations. No internet, no outsourced telemarketing jobs, no software millionaires, no Mochaccino frappe. The only jobs you can get are the kind where you carry a gun and can't get life insurance.
And that's the one kind of job Iraqi men really know. Under Saddam, the Iraqi Army was the fourth-biggest in the world, with 900,000 men. Considering there are only 24 million Iraqis, that's a lot of vets. And this was no slacker peacetime army, either. Iraq's been at war for most of the past generation. From 1980-88 they were in an all-out war with Iran. Then they attacked Kuwait. After we kicked their asses out of there, they had big rebellions in Kurdistan and the Shiite zone. Last year we gave them a refresher course in conventional war, and now they're doing advanced work on urban guerrilla stuff.
So most Iraqi men know the Army, know weapons, just aren't as fazed by organized violence as we'd be. If you go to sleep with small arms fire and wake up with car bombs, you learn to deal with it. People can get used to anything -- war, Fresno, the Black Plague, whatever.
So if you make it worth their while, they'll join. Whether they'll fight, that's another question. We paid a lot of South Vietnamese to put on the ARVN uniform, but we never convinced most of them to fight. And frankly, compared to the ING, ARVN is starting to look like the Wehrmacht. The ING just flat-out refused to attack Fallujah back in April. They won't even patrol with our troops in most towns, because we draw too much fire. These ING recruits are getting the big squeeze from both sides. That's how guerrilla war works: the idea is to make it impossible for anybody to stay neutral.
The insurgents' argument is simple: no matter how much the Americans are paying you, it won't do you much good if you die before you can collect your first paycheck. When they splatter a line of cop recruits, it's a message: find yourself another career, guys. And they have other scarier ways of making the point. For example, they kidnapped the two sons of an officer from that pitiful "Fallujah Brigade" we set up and told him the kids were dead unless he gave himself up. He did -- made a video apologizing for collaborating and was never seen again. He's fertilizing the desert somewhere, and his sons too, probably.
Our terms are pretty simple too: if you want to work at all, work for us because we're the only paying concern in town.
The ordinary Iraqi man has to make a guess about who's going to win. If he joins the Iraqi National Guard, survives his first five minutes in uniform, and the Americans win, he's set for life -- because an army job in a messed-up country like Iraq means power, bribes, respect. But if we get sick of it and leave like we did in South Vietnam, he and his family are going to die a slow, nasty way.
If you want to get really sick, just read about what happened to the Algerians who collaborated with the French after the French sailed off and left them to the mercy of the rebels. The ones who killed themselves and their families were the smart ones; they got off easy. The others... man, it was too much even for me. So all in all, career counseling day at an Iraqi high school must be a tricky job.
===== Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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