Intelligence gathering in Iraq relies on U.S. soldiers' detective work

This worked just swell in Vietnam as well didn't it?

http://www.newspress.com/Top/Article/article.jsp?Section=WORLD&ID=564760303881289741

TAJI, Iraq - Capt. Carson Green walked slowly down the highway, simmering in the sun, looking for signs of a roadside bombing that had ripped both feet off an American soldier.

Green thought that if he could find the site of the bombing, he could figure out where witnesses might have been standing - at roadside groceries, houses, taxi stands - and, he hoped, ''flip'' them into giving up the names of insurgents in the area.

But after a half-hour of going up and down the road, Green couldn't tell the new bomb craters from the old ones. The heat had climbed above 110 degrees with no hint of wind, and the asphalt, stretching toward the horizon, felt like a stovetop.

Frustrated, Green muttered an obscenity. ''Let's go,'' he said.

Green, 26, has commanded Alpha Company of the 4th Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team since April, when a bomb killed his predecessor.

Green, from Cumby, Texas, is on the front lines of a battle that's forced the U.S. Army to rethink the way it's fighting the war here. Most officers agree that victory in Iraq will be determined not by generals or weapons systems, but by captains like Green who decide how to fight an oft-unseen enemy in a land where they don't speak the language or know whom to trust.

for whom they are "building Democracy." And, to boot, they haven't been even remotely trained for the kind of war they are waging. What a tragedy. They are being used, and my suspicion is, more and more of them are realizing it.

either. Otherwise, why did his guy get his feet blown off? Seems to me the best answer is to get the hell out of the place.

Capture a mook, get two "witnesses" to claim he's the one who planted a bomb, then ship him off to Abu Ghraib to rot. Can't see a problem here :sarcasm: