Sometimes it takes me awhile to catch up on the news.
Yesterday I finally read an article
from the September 2010 issue of Service
Contractor magazine that I'd been carrying for awhile in my Land's End
canvas attaché bag.
The news: It concludes that more than 2,000 contractors have
died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Contractor deaths now represent
over 25 percent of all U.S. fatalities" in those conflicts, write Steven
Schooner and Collin Swan of the George Washington University Law School. (I
would bet that contractor KIAs are far higher, since there is no indication
that non-U.S. deaths have been tracked with any fidelity.)
In Iraq in both 2009 and 2010, and in Afghanistan in 2010,
contractors were running ahead of the U.S. military in losses,
the article indicates.
Speaking of Iraq: Can you imagine the family conversations
amongst Iraqis fleeing
homeward from Cairo? "Let's go
to Beirut, you said, it's nice. And then it wasn't so we moved to Egypt -- you
said, it's stable, the same old guy has been in charge for 30 years. Where
next, Mr. Smart Guy, Libya?!"
And speaking even more of Iraq, here, courtesy of Joel Wing
and Best Defense commenter Stephen Donnelly, is everything
you ever wanted to know about the map of Iraq, and more. The thing to remember
is that, contrary to widespread belief, Iraq is not an invented country:
This
myth, with accompanying imagery of British adviser Gertrude Bell and Winston Churchill
dividing up the Middle East during an English Garden party (before jumping down
Alice's rabbit hole for further entertainment), is incorrect and misleading.
The general political and administrative boundaries of modern Iraq conform with
well-understood historical and physical boundaries with three exceptions: Kuwait,
the waterways south of Basra, and the undefined desert regions: Kuwait, once
part of the Ottoman Basra province, emerged as a separate "nation"
under British tutelage; the desert boundaries, with few permanent inhabitants,
remains a somewhat ill-defined place (despite paper demarcations); and, the
waterways were further defined by much later treaties between adjacent Iran,
but the "Thalweg," the center line of the waterways, continues to
naturally shift against Iraq's interests.
With few exceptions (Kuwait and minor Iraq/Iran border areas), the settled
Iraqi population has known where Iraq was, including Kurds (who were very aware
of which part was Iraqi, Iranian and Turkish Kurdistan), on a generational
basis, and those boundaries remain unchanged.
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