Making Vietnam Look Like a Good Idea

Via Troy and BoingBoing, here’s an interesting essay by writer, EFF dude and member of the technorati elite, John Perry Barlow. On a flight recently, he sat next to a CEO of a rent-a-soldier company who has ‘troops’ deployed in Iraq:

Security, he said, is deteriorating rapidly. Zones that had seemed relatively safe a month ago are no longer secure. He would not have been surprised either by last week’s rocket attack on the Sheraton Hotel or the fact that on October 14, two suicide bombers were able to penetrate the heavily guarded Green Zone before blowing themselves and five others up.

He couldn’t imagine any way it would get better. The Iraqis, he said, have little respect for the puppet Allawi government. The Iraqi security forces we’re training will not be willing to fire on their own people. But many of their own people will be quite willing to fire on them, putting them at a significant disadvantage. Worse, even within the security forces, it’s hard to tell which side someone is on. The insurgents have an organize effort to infiltrate them, and thousands of recruits have been quietly mustered after discovering that they had connections to one rebel group or another.

You know, aside from members of the Bush administration, I haven’t heard anybody say that things are improving in Iraq. Returning Canadian soldiers, journalists, NGO workers–everyone keeps mentioning the word ‘Vietnam’. Now, this may just be pre-election posturing, but the sheer consistency of these reports is worrying.