Toby Johnson’s Blog

Someone just showed me a great article on a scientific poll recently conducted in Iraq by Zogby International and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, two well-respected polling organizations.

Among the findings (emphasis mine):

• Iraqis are optimistic. Seven out of 10 say they expect their country and their personal lives will be better five years from now. On both fronts, 32 percent say things will become much better.
• Five out of 10 said democracy is Western and won’t work in Iraq. One in 10 wasn’t sure. And four out of 10 said democracy can work in Iraq. People age 18-29 are much more rosy about democracy than other Iraqis, and women are significantly more positive than men.
• Asked to name one country they would most like Iraq to model its new government on from five possibilities — neighboring, Baathist Syria; neighbor and Islamic monarchy Saudi Arabia; neighbor and Islamist republic Iran; Arab lodestar Egypt; or the U.S. — the most popular model by far was the U.S. The U.S. was preferred as a model by 37 percent of Iraqis selecting from those five — more than Syria, Iran and Egypt put together.
• Asked whether Iraq should have an Islamic government, or instead let all people practice their own religion. Only 33 percent want an Islamic government; a solid 60 percent say no.
• 57 percent of Iraqis with an opinion have an unfavorable view of Osama bin Laden, with 41 percent of those saying it is a very unfavorable view.

All of this is very interesting, especially given the U.S. media’s insistence on portraying our presence in Iraq as a quagmire where we will continue to face guerilla attacks and an increasingly hostile populace who simply want us to leave. I would think that a poll such as this would be rather newsworthy, but I could not find any reference to this poll on any of the major news organizations’ websites.

The media love to play up the negative incidents in the “Sunni Triangle”, where resistance to us is fiercest and loyalty to Saddam is strongest (as the article states, “10,000 schools being rehabbed isn’t news; one school blowing up is a weeklong feeding frenzy”). This poll now shows us that this is a rather skewed perception of the country as a whole.

I am in the process of moving my entire website to a new server. Hopefully everything should be noticeably faster. If you notice anything that’s “broken”, please be sure to let me know!

You may have read in the news that National Guard and Reserve units in Iraq and surrounding regions will have their deployments extended so that they are in country for one year, as opposed to having train-up and outprocessing included in that year.

While nothing is ever certain in the military, all indications are that this will not affect our battalion. We are still on track for returning in November.

This also makes sense because our battalion is an infantry battalion. The news articles state that this new order was issued due to the critical special-skills duties that the National Guard and Reserve components provide. While these special-skills units (such as engineers, civil affaris, etc.) are brought in and out as needed, infantry units are deployed on a more fixed rotation schedule.

The Department of Defense recently issued a rotation schedule for infantry units being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The plan is for active-duty units to serve one-year rotations, augmented with 6-month deployments of National Guard Separate Infantry Brigades (SIB). My brigade, the 76th Infantry Brigade, is once such SIB.

So again, while nothing is ever certain, we have no reason right now to believe that we will be extended. We are still on track to be relieved of our current mission soon, and begin preparations for returning home.

I have attached a letter that our battalion commander, LTC Gentry, recently sent to the soldiers’ families.
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You’ll notice a new link on the main page’s menu under “Syndication”. It is a link to this page in a special format called RSS 2.0, for “Really Simple Syndication, version 2″. RSS itself is written in a language called XML, for “Extensible Markup Language”.

Syndication is a means of publishing content from different sites in a standardized format. If you go to lots of sites with constantly-updated information like news, blogs, gossip/rumors, and the like, chances are you have seen the logo elsewhere as well.

Instead of going out to all those sites to look for updates every day, you can use RSS to collect all that information in one place. The program I use for this is called AmphetaDesk, which lets you create your own custom webpage right on your computer. Each item from your favorite Channels will be summarized, with links to the full item.

Well, rip another page off the calendar! It’s now pretty definite that we’ll be heading home in early- to mid-November. At least they installed another generator near us, so power outages on the air conditioning units are now a thing of the past.

I’ve installed some new photo gallery software to make posting pictures easier, but it’s hard to find time to work on organizing them. The Germany album is almost finished though, so go ahead and check it out at http://www.tobiasly.com/gallery/albums.php.