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Starving Americans Out Someone In Green

Juan Cole 05/23/2007

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Starving the Americans Out

Someone in the Green Zone leaked the following memo, which shows that US personnel are now actually facing difficulties in getting food by convoy up from Kuwait. They avoid local food in the Baghdad region because of the danger guerrillas will poison it.

‘Due to a theater-wide delay in food delivery, menu selections will be limited for the near future. While every effort will be made to provide balanced meals, it may not be possible to offer the dishes you are used to seeing at each meal. Fresh fruits and salad bar items will also be severely limited or unavailable.’

The informant adds his own comment:

The bottom line is that our troops depend on a ground supply line that runs from Kuwait to the various bases in Iraq. When I was in Iraq last year at the U.S. base in Balad I had the chance to eat four meals a day–breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight rations (midrats). If you like late nights the midrats were great–steak, eggs, pancakes. Pretty good food. Well, based on this memo, it looks like those were the good old days. We don’t have enough convoys to give our troops three hot meals a day. ‘

See also Pat Lang’s comments.

The veracity of the memo has been challenged at some rightwing sites, but whatever the justice of their complaints about the logo (which may not be original and may have been in fact put there to disguise the source of the leak), the US Embassy memo has been confirmed in the Washington Post.

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About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

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Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires



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