A Culture of Ijaza
Ijaza is the Iraqi word for vacation.
Iraqi soldiers work two weeks and take a week off. That's four months of vacation a year. Apparently, nothing much gets in the way of that week of vacation. Not a military operation by any means.
NPR.org has a story today about Ijaza. A U.S. officer tried to put together an operation that was to include 1,500 Iraqi troops. The area had 12,000 Iraqi troops, so no problem? Wrong. Putting aside that a portion of the 12k were "ghost" troops, on the payroll, but nonexistent, there were a bunch more that were on vacation. The officer had to negotiate hard to get the 1,500. Our military had to negotiate with the Iraqi military to get it to supply troops to fight the war that it is about to take over, if you believe our military and our current administration. OK, those jibs were subjects of previous posts.
Next problem, the troops are troops in name only. Guard duty? That doesn't get in the way of a nap on the part of an Iraqi soldier according to the story.
This post is posted as just another small example of why we need to quit this stupidity. Why in the world should we put our military in a situation where it takes up the slack for people who don't much care about what they are doing?
And for those of you that label me as a "liberal/commie/pinko," remember the story comes from NPR, the source of all things "LCP."
7 comments:
Well Dave, if you are a "Commie/liberal/pinko" then gee, by gosh, by golly, I must be one too cause my sentiments match yours here, item for item.
I hadn't heard about this. I thought the Europeans had it easy with their whole month of August off, but this takes the cake. Why are the locals not taking this as seriously as the US soldiers? No wonder their army isn't nearly ready to take over.
We need to get out of there, for sure...
Google disagrees with your definition of the word... more like license or diploma.
But I was well informed on the Iraqi vacation-taking/ghost payrolling soldier problem... after all, I read Doonesbury....
I kind of like it as a "license." Damned NPR, or maybe Google has it wrong. Nah, couln't happen.
wait. I thought liberal commie pinkos were in favor of increased vacation time.
or was that not the point?
Pos, we LCP's sometimes have conflicting goals in life.
I suppose I could solve this problem by emigrating, joining and getting a pogue post (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pogue).
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