http://select.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/opini...1&hp&oref=login

Dying to Save the G.O.P. Congress
By FRANK RICH
Published: October 29, 2006

IF you happened to be up around dawn on Tuesday, you could witness the death rattle of our adventure in Iraq live on CNN. Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the American commander, were making new promises from the bunker of the Green Zone, inspiring about as much confidence as Jackie Gleason and Art Carney hatching a get-rich-quick scheme to sell a kitchen gadget on “The Honeymooners.”

“Success in Iraq is possible and can be achieved on a realistic timetable,” said Mr. Khalilzad. Iraq can be “in a very good place in 12 months,” said General Casey. Even a child could see how much was wrong with this picture.

If there really is light at the end of the tunnel, why after three and a half years can’t we yet guarantee light in Baghdad? Symbolically enough, television transmission of the Khalilzad-Casey press conference was interrupted by another of the city’s daily power failures. If Iraq’s leaders had signed on to the 12-month plan of “benchmarks” the Americans advertised, why were those leaders nowhere in sight? We found out one day later, when the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, mocked the very idea of an America-imposed timetable. “I am positive that this is not the official policy of the American government, but rather a result of the ongoing election campaign,” he said, adding dismissively, “And that does not concern us much.”

Give the Iraqi leader credit for a Borat-like candor that almost every American in this sorry tale lacks. Of course all the White House’s latest jabberwocky about “benchmarks” and “milestones” and “timetables” (never to be confused with those Defeatocrats’ “timelines”) is nothing more than an election-year P.R. strategy, as is the laughable banishment of “stay the course.” There is no new American plan to counter the apocalypse now playing out in Iraq, only new packaging to pacify American voters between now and Nov. 7. And recycled packaging at that: President Bush had last announced that he and Mr. Maliki were developing “benchmarks” to “measure progress” in Iraq back in June.

As Richard Holbrooke, the broker of the Bosnia peace accords, has observed, the only real choice left for the president now is either “escalation or disengagement.” But there are no troops, let alone money or national will, for escalation. Disengagement within a year, however, is favored by 54 percent of Americans and, more important, 71 percent of Iraqis. After Election Day, adults in Washington will step in, bow to the obvious and pull the plug. The current administration strategy — praying for a miracle — is not an option. The current panacea favored by anxious Republican Congressional candidates — firing Donald Rumsfeld — is too little, too late.

The adults in charge of disengagement will include the Bush family consigliere, James Baker, whose bipartisan Iraq Study Group will present its findings after the election, and John Warner, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, who has promised a re-evaluation of Iraq policy within roughly the same time frame. Democrats will have a role in direct proportion to the clout they gain in the midterms.

One way or another the various long-shot exit scenarios being debated in the capital will be sorted out: federalism and partition; reaching out somehow for help from Iran and Syria; replacing Mr. Maliki with a Saddam-lite strongman. There will be some kind of timeline, or whatever you want to call it, with enforced benchmarks, or whatever you want to call them, for phased withdrawal. (Read “Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now” by George McGovern and William R. Polk for a particularly persuasive blueprint.) In any event, the timeline will end no later than Inauguration Day 2009.

In keeping with the political cynicism that gave birth to this war and has recklessly prolonged it, the only ones being kept in the dark about this inevitable denouement are our fighting men and women. They remain trapped, dying in accelerating numbers in a civil war that is now killing so many Iraqi civilians that Mr. Maliki this month ordered his health ministry to stop releasing any figures.

Our troops are held hostage by the White House’s political imperatives as much as they are by the violence. Desperate to maintain the election-year P.R. ruse that an undefined “victory” is still within reach, Mr. Bush went so far at Wednesday’s press conference as to say that “absolutely, we’re winning” in Iraq. He explained his rationale to George Stephanopoulos last weekend, when he asserted that the number of casualties was the enemy’s definition of success or failure, not his. “I define success or failure as to whether or not the Iraqis will be able to defend themselves,” the president said, and “as to whether the unity government” is making the “difficult decisions necessary to unite the country.”

Unfortunately, the war is a calamity by both of those definitions as well. The American command’s call for a mere 3,000 more Iraqi troops to help defend Baghdad has gone unanswered. As we’ve learned from Operation Together Forward, when Iraqis do stand up, violence goes up. And when American and British troops stand down, murderous sectarian militias, some of them allied with that “unity” government, fill the vacuum, taking over entire cities like Amara and Balad in broad daylight. As for those “difficult decisions” Mr. Bush regards as so essential, the Iraqi government’s policy is cut and run. Mr. Maliki is not cracking down on rampaging militias but running interference for their kingpin, Moktada al-Sadr. Mr. Maliki treats this radical anti-American Shiite cleric, his political ally, with far more deference than he shows the American president.

The ultimate chutzpah is that Mr. Bush, the man who sold us Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds and “Mission Accomplished,” is trivializing the chaos in Iraq as propaganda. The enemy’s “sophisticated” strategy, he said in last weekend’s radio address, is to distribute “images of violence” to television networks, Web sites and journalists to “demoralize our country.”

This is a morally repugnant argument. The “images of violence” from Iraq are not fake — like, say, the fiction our government manufactured about the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman or the upbeat news stories the Pentagon spends millions of dollars planting in Iraqi newspapers today. These images of violence are real. Americans really are dying at the fastest pace in at least a year, and Iraqis in the greatest numbers to date. To imply that this carnage is magnified by the news media, whether the American press or Al Jazeera, is to belittle the gravity of the escalated bloodshed and to duck accountability for the mismanagement of the war. Mr. Bush’s logic is reminiscent of Jeffrey Skilling’s obtuse view of his innocence in the Enron scandal, though at least Mr. Skilling has been held accountable for the wreckage of lives on his watch.

It is also wrong to liken what’s going on now, as Mr. Bush has, to the Tet offensive. That sloppy Vietnam analogy was first made by Mr. Rumsfeld in June 2004 to try to explain away the explosive rise in the war’s violence at that time. It made a little more sense then, since both the administration and the American public were still being startled by the persistence of the Iraq insurgency, much as the Johnson administration and Walter Cronkite were by the Viet Cong’s tenacity in 1968. Before Tet, as Stanley Karnow’s history, “Vietnam,” reminds us, public approval of L.B.J.’s conduct of the war still stood at 40 percent, yet to hit rock bottom.

Where we are in Iraq today is not 1968 but 1971, after the bottom had fallen out, Johnson had abdicated and America had completely turned on Vietnam. At that point, approval of Richard Nixon’s handling of the war was at 34 percent, comparable to Mr. Bush’s current 30. The percentage of Americans who thought the Vietnam War was “morally wrong” stood at 51, comparable to the 58 percent who now think the Iraq war was a mistake. Many other Vietnam developments in 1971 have their counterparts in 2006: the leaking of classified Pentagon reports revealing inept and duplicitous war policy, White House demonization of the press, the joining of moderate Republican senators with Democrats to press for a specific date for American withdrawal.

That’s why it seemed particularly absurd when, in his interview with Mr. Stephanopoulos last weekend, Mr. Bush said that “the fundamental question” Americans must answer is “should we stay?” They’ve been answering that question loud and clear for more than a year now.

What we should be thinking about instead are our obligations to those who are doing the staying. Kevin Tillman, who served with his brother in Iraq and Afghanistan, observed in an angry online essay this month: “Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a 5-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet.”

If we really support the troops, we’ll move past Mr. Bush’s “fundamental question” to one from 1971 posed by a 27-year-old Vietnam veteran, John Kerry, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102806A

Ruining America
By Joe Galloway
Military.com

Thursday 26 October 2006

If President George Bush's hasty news conference on Iraq this week was the Republican October Surprise - unveiling some sudden presidential flexibility after three and a half years of stubbornly staying a losing course - it didn't work.

With the midterm elections now days away, it smacked more of a change in semantics than a serious change in the direction of a war that seems to be spiraling out of control.

"Benchmark" is the new White House buzzword. We're not setting a "timetable" for the withdrawal of America's 147,000 troops in Iraq. We're not putting any real heat on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. No cutting and running for us.

And, yes, the president has full faith and confidence in the chief architect of the war in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. You're doing a heckuva job, Rummy. Never mind that your approval rating is at 12 percent among the American people, Don. The Decider puts you at 110 percent.

So we're going to stay put in Iraq; going, in fact, to stay the course all the way to victory. We aren't going to be drawing down our troops, who are square in the middle of a burgeoning Iraqi civil war. In fact, we might even send more troops over there if the president can find any to send from an Army and Marine Corps already stretched so thin that you can read your morning paper through them.

The president says that there'll be tough fighting to come, which is hardly news to a military that's already suffered more than 2,800 killed and 22,000 wounded; a military so ground down that it won't be able to man the next annual deployments without once again reaching out and activating thousands of Army National Guard and Reserve troops that have maxed out their active duty availability.

Oh yes. One other bit of news: the White House that says nothing is too good for our troops has turned its back on a plea by Army leaders for a $25 billion increase in its 2008 budget so it can carry out the missions the administration has assigned to it.

The White House Office of Management and Budget rejected Army chief Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker's extraordinary plea by for the additional funds to pay for repairing and replacing thousands of worn out and blown up tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and Humvees.

Instead of the $25 billion that Schoomaker says the Army needs just to keep doing what it's been doing with spit, adhesive tape and baling wire for the last five years, the Pentagon says the Army can have $7 billion.

The president declared himself confident that Republicans would sweep to victory and maintain their stranglehold on both houses of a Congress that's done nothing but rubberstamp Bush's war policies and Republican efforts to enrich their fat-cat donors and themselves, of course.

If he's right and that's the result of the Nov. 7 elections, then the American people will finally have fulfilled H.L. Mencken's prophecy that we'd continue choosing the lowest common denominator until, in the end, we get precisely the government we deserve.

Meantime, Vice President Dick Cheney confirmed that some of the senior al-Qaeda terrorists in our custody have been subjected to "water-boarding," a torture that brings the victim within a hair of drowning and suffocation. Cheney declared that it was a "no-brainer." My thoughts exactly: Only people with no brains opt to torture a captive in violation of domestic and international law.

This unseemly circus and its clowns in Congress can't go away fast enough and with enough dishonor and disgrace to suit the circumstances. Their place in America's history is secure: They will go down as the worst administration and the worst Congress we've ever had. Period.

They deserve to lose both the House and the Senate on Nov. 7, and the White House in 2008. They bullied their way into a war that they thought would be a slam-dunk and then so bungled things that the only superpower left in the world has been humbled and hobbled in a world that they've made more dangerous for us.

Thanks, guys. You've done a heckuva job. We won't forget it.

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Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist. One of America's preeminent war correspondents, with more than four decades as a reporter and writer, he recently concluded an assignment as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell at the State Department. Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent 22 years as a foreign and war correspondent and bureau chief for United Press International, and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and senior writer for U.S. News & World Report magazine. In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division (Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The finest combat correspondent of our generation - a soldier's reporter."

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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1027-01.htm
Published on Friday, October 27, 2006 by the Inter Press Service
UN Passes Arms Trade Treaty Over US Opposition
by Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS - United Nations member states voted Thursday to create an international treaty to curb the illicit trade in guns and other light weapons, despite strong opposition from the United States and other big powers.

The United States, the world's largest supplier of small arms, was the only country that opposed the resolution.

A Liberian rebel armed with an AK-47 assault rifle sits with a colleague in Monrovia, in a file photo. A U.N. General Assembly committee voted on Thursday to let work begin on a new treaty intended to strengthen arms embargoes and prevent human rights abuses by setting uniform global standards for arms deals. (Juda Ngwenya/Reuters)

On Thursday, a vast majority of delegates to the U.N. General Assembly's first committee endorsed the resolution calling for the establishment of a treaty to stop weapons transfers that fuel conflict, poverty and serious human rights violations.

As many as 139 countries voted in favor of the resolution while 24 abstained. The United States, the world's largest supplier of small arms, was the only country that opposed the resolution.

Other major arms-manufacturing nations that oppose the treaty but did not participate in the voting include Russia, China, India and Pakistan.

The vote came after three years of complex diplomatic negotiations and a worldwide campaign by civil society groups that involved more than one million people in 170 countries.

Civil society groups said they were extremely happy with the outcome of the vote.

"It's a great victory," Helen Hughes of the London-based Amnesty International told IPS. "We had governments in that room who finally listened to human rights campaigners."

Jeremy Hobbs, director of Oxfam International, described the treaty as an international commitment to "end the scandal of the unregulated arms trade".

Both Amnesty International and Oxfam had been at the forefront of lobbying efforts in support of the treaty. This week they were joined by 15 Nobel Peace Prize-winners in urging nations to vote for the resolution.

"No weapons should ever be transferred if they will be used for serious violations of human rights," they said in a letter to the delegates who are currently attending the General Assembly session.

Supporters of the resolution said they hoped that it would help close loopholes in laws that allow the flow of small arms to conflict zones across the world, and thus give rise to violations of human rights and undermine development.

In their letter, the Nobel Peace laureates said all international weapons transfers should be authorized by a recognised state and carried out in accordance with international law.

"No state should authorize international arms transfers that violate the specific obligations under international law," the letter said. It further recommended that governments submit national reports on arms transfers to an international registry.

The current volume of the global arms trade is estimated to be around 1.1 trillion dollars, an amount that is likely to increase further by the end of this year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Independent experts who have worked closely with the United Nations on the issue of small arms proliferation estimate that in the past three years more than one million people have been killed as a result of the unchecked flow of guns and other small weapons.

"A thousand people die every day and many more harmed as a result of the proliferation and misuse of small arms," said Rebecca Peters, the director of the International Action Network on Small Arms.

"The world can no longer leave civilians to the mercy of gunrunners and arms brokers who are profiting every year," she added in a statement calling for a worldwide ban on the use and supply of illicit weapons.

Several emerging arms exporters, such as Brazil, Bulgaria and Ukraine, as well as many countries that have been devastated by armed violence, including Colombia, East Timor, Haiti, Liberia and Rwanda, voted in favor of the resolution.

Expressing her support for the resolution, Amnesty International's secretary-general Irene Khan described the vote as "an historic step to stop irresponsible and immoral arms transfers".

"It will prevent the death, rape and displacement of thousands of people," she said in a statement.

The Nobel laureates signing the letter included South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Titu, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, Costa Rican president Oscar Arias, Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, top U.N. nuclear watchdog Mohamed El Baradei, and former Polish president and anti-communist labour leader Lech Walesa.

Activists said they were disappointed with the U.S. role in the negotiations and its eventual decision to reject the resolution.

"This is not a good foreign policy," said Amnesty International's Hughes, who acknowledged that the U.S. laws on weapons manufacturing and supply were "relatively stronger".

"Their 'no' vote shows that they are opposed to the need for effective international controls," Hughes said.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States accounted for 48 percent of total military spending worldwide in 2005.

The resolution, which was sponsored by Argentina, Australia, Costa Rica, Finland, Japan, Kenya and Britain, calls for the establishment of a group of experts to look at the feasibility, scope and parameters of the treaty, which must report back to the first committee by the fall of 2008.

© Copyright 2006 IPS - Inter Press Service

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

This is Baghdad. What could be worse?

By Anthony Shadid
Sunday, October 29, 2006; Page B01

BAGHDAD

There was an almost forgettable exchange earlier this month in the Iraqi National Assembly, itself on the fringe of relevance in today's disintegrating Iraq. Lawmakers debated whether legislation should be submitted to a committee to determine if it was compatible with Islam. Ideas were put forth, as well as criticism. Why not a committee to determine whether legislation endorses democratic principles? one asked. In stepped Mahmoud Mashadani, the assembly's speaker, to settle the dispute.

"Any law or decision that goes against Islam, we'll put it under the kundara!" he thundered.

"God is greatest!" lawmakers shouted back, in a rare moment of agreement between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

Kundara means shoe, and the bit of bluster by Mashadani said a lot about Baghdad today.

It had been almost a year since I was in the Iraqi capital, where I worked as a reporter in the days of Saddam Hussein, the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, and the occupation, guerrilla war and religious resurgence that followed. On my return, it was difficult to grasp how atomized and violent the 1,250-year-old city has become. Even on the worst days, I had always found Baghdad's most redeeming quality to be its resilience, a tenacious refusal among people I met over three years to surrender to the chaos unleashed when the Americans arrived. That resilience is gone, overwhelmed by civil war, anarchy or whatever term could possibly fit. Baghdad now is convulsed by hatred, paralyzed by suspicion; fear has forced many to leave. Carnage its rhythm and despair its mantra, the capital, it seems, no longer embraces life.

"A city of ghosts," a friend told me, her tone almost funereal.

The commotion in the streets -- goods spilling across sidewalks, traffic snarled under a searing sun -- once prompted the uninitiated to conclude that Baghdad was reviving. Of course, they were seeing the city through a windshield, the often angry voices on the streets inaudible. Today, with traffic dwindling, stores shuttered and streets empty by nightfall, that conceit no longer holds.

Even the propaganda, once ubiquitous and often incongruous, is gone. One piece I recalled from two years ago: a map of Iraq divided into three colored bands. In white, it read, "Progress." In red, "Iraq." In white again, "Prosperity." The promises are now more modest: "However strong the wind," reads a new poster of a woman clutching her child, "it will pass." More indicative of the mood, perhaps, was one of the old banners still hanging. Faded and draped over a building scarred with craters from the invasion, it was an ad for the U.S.-funded Iraqi network, al-Iraqiya. In Arabic, its slogan reads, "Prepare your eyes for more."

As I spoke to friends, some for the first time in more than a year, that was their fear: more of the kundara.

"When anyone is against you, when anyone has differences with me, I will put a kundara in his mouth, I will shove a kundara down his throat, I will hit him with a kundara, and so on," another friend told me.

"We live in a kundara culture today."

I had first met Karima Salman during the U.S. invasion. She was a stout Shiite Muslim matriarch with eight children, living in a three-room apartment in the working-class district of Karrada. Trash was piled at her entrance, a dented, rusted steel gate perched along a sagging brick sidewalk. When I visited last year, the street, still one of the safer ones in Baghdad, exuded a veneer of normalcy. Makeshift markets overflowed with goods piled on rickety stands: socks imported from China, T-shirts from Syria and stacks of shoes, sunglasses and lingerie. Down the street were toys: plastic guns, a Barbie knockoff in a black veil, and a pirate carrying an AK-47 and a grenade. There was a "Super Mega Heavy Metal Fighter" action figure and a doll that, when squeezed, played "It's a Small World."
On this day, the metal stands were empty, as were the streets.

"Praise God," Karima said as I asked how she was. In a moment, her smile faded as she realized the absurdity of her words. "Of course, it's not good," she said, shaking her head. "There's nothing that's ever happened like what's happening in Iraq."

On June 23, 2005, three car bombs detonated in Karrada, outside her home, wrecking the Abdul-Rasul Ali mosque and spraying shrapnel that sliced into the forearm of one of her five daughters, Hiba. Friends at school nicknamed her "Shrapnel Hiba." Two months ago, yet another bomb hurled glass through their window, cutting the head of Hiba's twin sister, Duaa. Four stitches sealed the wound. Over that time, Karima lost her job as a maid at the Palm Hotel, where she had earned about $33 a month.

"People are too scared to come," she said matter of factly.

Next to her sat her son Mohammed. During the invasion, Mohammed, an ex-convict, had joined a motley unit of a dozen men patrolling Baghdad's streets as part of the Baath Party militia. Now he had entered the ranks of the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia loyal to a young cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, and blamed for many of today's sectarian killings in Baghdad. Karima's son-in-law Ali had been an officer in the American-equipped police force, earning $300 a month. He quit after receiving a death threat. Now he, too, had joined the Mahdi Army.

"Not all of them are good," Karima told me, casting a glance at her son.

Stocky and a little surly, Mohammed smiled. "Who else is going to protect Iraq?" he asked.

They debated the causes of the violence that, these days, is the topic of almost every conversation. Radical Sunnis, the Americans, Iranian agents, other militias. "Even the Egyptians," Karima offered. "And the Sudanese," Mohammed added.

"Brothers are killing their brothers," she said.

Stories poured forth: a bomb amputating the arm of a 10-year-old neighbor; another killing Marwan, the barber.

"If they brought the Israelis, the Jews, and they ruled Iraq, it would be better," said Karima, her face framed by a black veil. Sunlight bathed the room; electricity, as usual, was cut off. "It would be a million times better than a Sunni, a million times better than a Shiite."

Her first grandchild, 2-month-old Fahd, sat next to her. His expression was rare in Baghdad: eyes expectant, fearless.

"Is it not a pity to bring a baby in a world like this?" she asked. "It's a shame."
Her eldest daughter, Fatima, looked on.

"One-third of us are dying, one-third of us are fleeing and one-third of us will be widows," she said.

"This is Iraq," Karima added.

The last time I had visited Faruq Saad Eddin, he and his wife, Muna, had argued over whether their eldest son should have left the country. We sat in Jihad, a neighborhood so dangerous now that a stranger risks death by entering it. A generator droned in the background; occasional bomb blasts thundered in the distance, probably homemade mines targeting U.S. patrols. An urbane former diplomat, Faruq had been upset. He worried about what would become of his ancient land if its capable fled.

"You can't just cut out and run away," he told me. "This is our country and sooner or later our children will come back. The resilience of the people, that's what 11,000 years means," he said. "Someone who has 11,000 years, 100 years to lose here or there is not that much."

On April 17, Faruq and Muna left Iraq at the insistence of their son, who had paid a year's rent for an apartment in Jordan. A month later, a car bomb detonated outside their Baghdad home, shattering the windows in the room where we once had shared bitter coffee.

On a cool morning in the Amman neighborhood of Umm al-Summaq, Faruq shook his head at the arbitrariness of fate.

"We would have been killed, no doubt about it," he said.

"We are all stranded, here and there, Iraqis," he added.

A friend once compared the elderly who are reluctant to leave Baghdad to the blind. Take them away from the familiarity of their home, garden and street, and they become lost and disoriented. Faruq has sought new routines: morning strolls, e-mails to friends, a voracious appetite for news and late-night updates on his favorite baseball team, the St. Louis Cardinals. His apartment overlooked the rolling hills of Amman, glowing in the morning's soft sun; his granddaughter Mayasa played giddily next to him with a stuffed toy.

I should feel happy," he said.
He shook his head again, a gesture that meant he wasn't.

"We have a heavy heart, really," he said after a few moments of silence. "Just knowing what's happening makes us grieve."

I had come to know Wamidh Nadhme in 2002, before the invasion. A professor of political science at Baghdad University, he was a forthright voice in those tense, uneasy days when Hussein was still in power. He tried to speak with complete honesty despite the possible consequences of doing so in a police state. With an ever-present Dunhill cigarette, he would slowly field questions back then, reasoning out every intricate response, surrounded by his French-style furniture, worn Persian carpets and a framed piece of papyrus from Egypt, where he had spent time in exile as a young activist. But on this visit, reason eluded him, as did explanation.

"I find myself unable to understand what's going on," he said.

Wamidh had settled into what he called "withdrawal." He still visited the university once a week, but Baghdad was simply too dangerous to venture outside. After nightfall, the streets of his neighborhood of Adhamiya look like they might an hour or so before dawn: dark, without traffic, and menacing. As we talked, helicopters rumbled overhead. Gunfire burst almost continuously.

"You feel like the country is exploding," he said.

We traded stories. One I had heard from a friend: Insurgents stopped a driver at a checkpoint. They opened his trunk. "Why do you have a spare tire?" the insurgent asked solemnly. "You don't have trust in God?"

Well into 2005, Wamidh has bristled at the notion of a sectarian divide, even as the very geography of Baghdad began to transform into Shiite and Sunni halves divided by the Tigris River. Like many Iraqis, he blamed the Americans for naively viewing the country solely through that sectarian prism before the war, then forging policies that helped make it that way afterward. He ran through other "awful mistakes": the carnage unleashed by Sunni insurgents affiliated with al-Qaeda, the assassination of a Shiite ayatollah in 2003 who may have bridged differences, the devolution of Sadr's movement today into armed, revenge-minded mobs.

As Wamidh finished, he flashed his customary modesty. "Perhaps you could correct me?" he offered.

I asked him whether it would become worse if the American military withdrew.

He looked at me for a moment without saying anything, as though he were a little confused.

"What could be worse?" he asked, knitting his brow.

I saw Wamidh again a week later, and the question had lingered with him. "I sometimes wonder what I would do if I were the Americans," he said over a traditional Ramadan dinner. His answer seemed to hurt him. "I have no idea, really."

On April 9, 2003, Firdaus Square became the lasting image of the U.S. entry into Baghdad. In its center was a metal statue of Hussein in a suit, his arm outstretched in socialist realist fashion. Like an arena of spectators, columns of descending height encircled him, each bearing the initials "S.H." on their cupolas. By early afternoon that day, hundreds of Iraqis swarmed around the statue with one task in mind: bring it down. It marked the fall. A year later, amid uprisings by Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and Sadr's militia in Baghdad and the south, it spoke of occupation. The square was deserted, guarded by U.S. tanks whose barrels read, "Beastly Boy" and "Bloodlust." Soldiers, edgy, had orders to shoot anyone with a weapon. At times, music blared over speakers on a Humvee.

One song: "Ring of Fire," by Johnny Cash.

As I stood in Firdaus Square this day, after invasion, liberation and occupation, I wondered what word described Baghdad.

"This is a civil war now," Harith Abdel-Hamid, a psychiatrist, had told me, trying to diagnose the madness. "When you see hundreds of people killed every day, corpses of people tortured in the streets every day, what else does it mean?"

"Call it what you will," he said, "but it is a civil war."

Perhaps. But I felt as though I was witnessing something more: the final, frenzied maturity of once-inchoate forces unleashed more than three years ago by the invasion. There was civil war-style sectarian killing, its echoes in Lebanon a generation ago. Alongside it were gangland turf battles over money, power and survival; a raft of political parties and their militias fighting a zero-sum game; a raging insurgency; the collapse of authority; social services a chimera; and no way forward for an Iraqi government ordered to act by Americans who themselves are still seen as the final arbiter and, as a result, still depriving that government of legitimacy.

Civil war was perhaps too easy a term, a little too tidy.

I looked out on the square. On one side were rows of concrete barricades and barbed wire, having faded almost organically into the landscape. In another direction, a billboard read: "Terrorism has no religion." Across the street, a poster portraying Iraqi police pleaded: "We are the heroes fighting for the sake of Baghdad." In the middle of the square, on the stone perch where Hussein's statue once stood, were torn scraps of other posters: "Your voice," "the nation," "patriotism," "dialogue," "building the future." The words were isolated, without context, like fragments of a clay tablet.

Sirens soon pierced the square. Two armed police escorts, headed in opposite directions, rushed along the street. Each frantically waved at the other to pull over. Guns dangling from the window, they fired volleys into the air to intimidate each other.

In time, the one with fewer rifles and fewer men let the other pass. They were playing by the rules of the kundara.

In the square, Salam Ahmed sat with a friend, Saad Nasser, under the statue, looking out at the scene.

"They died under Saddam, and they're dying now," Salam said.

Unshaven, wearing a baseball cap, Saad looked at the ground. He was grim, angry and dejected.

"No one can stop it but God," he said. "Only God has the power."

shadida@washpost.com

Anthony Shadid, a Washington Post foreign correspondent, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He is the author of "Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War" (Picador).

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=133108

BLOG | Posted 10/27/2006 @ 10:44am
Return of the Body Count?
Tom Engelhardt

It's been clear since the Afghan War began in 2001 that no one had the Vietnam analogy more programmatically on their brains than the Bush team in the White House and the Pentagon. It was visibly clear that they went into Iraq in 2003 playing an opposites game with the "mistakes" of Vietnam (as they saw them)--while excoriating any critics who cared to make comparisons to the Vietnam experience. Part of administration planning was clearly aimed at avoiding all enemy "body counts," since (as the Vietnam War dragged on) the body count of kills, announced in Saigon each day, came to discredit the whole effort. All blood, no results. So, starting in Afghanistan, this administration was clearly going to produce only results and no enemy body counts.

Tommy Franks, the US commander of that operation, famously said so. "We don't do body counts" was his statement. But--until this week--we had no other insider confirmation that, right down to the body count, Vietnam remained the anti-template for the war in Iraq.

Tuesday, however, was Radio Day, a gathering of rabid, right-wing radio shock jocks in a heated tent on the North Lawn of the White House, where the top honchos of this administration right up to Karl Rove and Dick Cheney sat for interviews with Sean Hannity & Co. to rally the faithful two weeks before a shaky midterm election. It was an event, as Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post found out, closed to "the press" (except for ten minutes of "pool" coverage). On Wednesday, the President himself made amends, opening up the inner sanctum, the Oval Office, to the press -- well, 8 "conservative journalists" anyway.

Byron York of the National Review was there and wrote a revealing piece Wednesday about the President's growing frustration over Iraq. It seems that the man who, in December 2005, finally offered a cumulative (unbelievably low-ball) body count of 30,000 for all Iraqi deaths by violence since 2003 and then "stood by" that same number almost 11 bloody months later, was most frustrated that he couldn't offer the American people a real, notch-on-the-gun, continuous measure of "progress" in Iraq -- just how many enemies we were knocking off there regularly. "We don't get to say," said Bush, in what was evidently an outburst of irritation, "that -- a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it."

And why exactly can't the President reveal that proud -- and obviously high -- figure to us when, as he said, comparing Iraq to World War II (where progress was so much easier to measure), there are so few other indices of success? He was willing to reveal just why for the first time in this passage from the York piece:


"'We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team,' Bush said, in a clear reference to the tabulations of enemy killed that became a hallmark of the Vietnam War. And that, in turn, "gives you the impression that [U.S. troops] are just there -- kind of moving around, directing traffic, and somebody takes a shot at them and they're down."

So now we know. This can officially be declared the anti-Vietnam, anti-body count war. The President has told us so. And it's darn frustrating for a man who, according to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, once kept in his Oval Office desk drawer "his own personal scorecard for the war" in the form of photographs with brief biographies and personality sketches of those judged to be the world's most dangerous terrorists--each ready to be crossed out by the President as his forces took them down. And a man who is truly frustrated, well, he just has to vent sometime, doesn't he? Perhaps, since so much else from the Vietnam era has returned to haunt us, it's time for the official return of the body count or, as Donald Rumsfeld likes to call all the measuring the administration does behind the scenes, the "metrics" of "success."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102806A.shtml

Ruining America
By Joe Galloway
Military.com

Thursday 26 October 2006

If President George Bush's hasty news conference on Iraq this week was the Republican October Surprise - unveiling some sudden presidential flexibility after three and a half years of stubbornly staying a losing course - it didn't work.

With the midterm elections now days away, it smacked more of a change in semantics than a serious change in the direction of a war that seems to be spiraling out of control.

"Benchmark" is the new White House buzzword. We're not setting a "timetable" for the withdrawal of America's 147,000 troops in Iraq. We're not putting any real heat on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. No cutting and running for us.

And, yes, the president has full faith and confidence in the chief architect of the war in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. You're doing a heckuva job, Rummy. Never mind that your approval rating is at 12 percent among the American people, Don. The Decider puts you at 110 percent.

So we're going to stay put in Iraq; going, in fact, to stay the course all the way to victory. We aren't going to be drawing down our troops, who are square in the middle of a burgeoning Iraqi civil war. In fact, we might even send more troops over there if the president can find any to send from an Army and Marine Corps already stretched so thin that you can read your morning paper through them.

The president says that there'll be tough fighting to come, which is hardly news to a military that's already suffered more than 2,800 killed and 22,000 wounded; a military so ground down that it won't be able to man the next annual deployments without once again reaching out and activating thousands of Army National Guard and Reserve troops that have maxed out their active duty availability.

Oh yes. One other bit of news: the White House that says nothing is too good for our troops has turned its back on a plea by Army leaders for a $25 billion increase in its 2008 budget so it can carry out the missions the administration has assigned to it.

The White House Office of Management and Budget rejected Army chief Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker's extraordinary plea by for the additional funds to pay for repairing and replacing thousands of worn out and blown up tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and Humvees.

Instead of the $25 billion that Schoomaker says the Army needs just to keep doing what it's been doing with spit, adhesive tape and baling wire for the last five years, the Pentagon says the Army can have $7 billion.

The president declared himself confident that Republicans would sweep to victory and maintain their stranglehold on both houses of a Congress that's done nothing but rubberstamp Bush's war policies and Republican efforts to enrich their fat-cat donors and themselves, of course.

If he's right and that's the result of the Nov. 7 elections, then the American people will finally have fulfilled H.L. Mencken's prophecy that we'd continue choosing the lowest common denominator until, in the end, we get precisely the government we deserve.

Meantime, Vice President Dick Cheney confirmed that some of the senior al-Qaeda terrorists in our custody have been subjected to "water-boarding," a torture that brings the victim within a hair of drowning and suffocation. Cheney declared that it was a "no-brainer." My thoughts exactly: Only people with no brains opt to torture a captive in violation of domestic and international law.

This unseemly circus and its clowns in Congress can't go away fast enough and with enough dishonor and disgrace to suit the circumstances. Their place in America's history is secure: They will go down as the worst administration and the worst Congress we've ever had. Period.

They deserve to lose both the House and the Senate on Nov. 7, and the White House in 2008. They bullied their way into a war that they thought would be a slam-dunk and then so bungled things that the only superpower left in the world has been humbled and hobbled in a world that they've made more dangerous for us.

Thanks, guys. You've done a heckuva job. We won't forget it.

--------

Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist. One of America's preeminent war correspondents, with more than four decades as a reporter and writer, he recently concluded an assignment as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell at the State Department. Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent 22 years as a foreign and war correspondent and bureau chief for United Press International, and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and senior writer for U.S. News & World Report magazine. In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division (Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The finest combat correspondent of our generation - a soldier's reporter."

-------

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/current

Criticism Mounts of U.S. Generals in Iraq
Top warmakers like Gen. John Abizaid have thus far escaped blame for the failures in Iraq. But that's starting to change
By SALLY B. DONNELLY

Posted Friday, Oct. 27, 2006
The Bush administration's recent shift in strategy on the Iraq War — ending talk about "staying the course" and replacing it with a new emphasis on flexibility in response to changing conditions on the ground — may be a smart political tactic. But the implication of Bush's newfound candor, and his insistence that his decisions are being directed by advice from his generals on the ground, raises an unspoken question. If the generals are running the war and it is going so badly, shouldn't they share some of the blame?

Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the successful Iraq invasion in 2003, has come in for his share of criticism, for failing to plan sufficiently for the postwar phase. But the generals who replaced Franks in the summer of 2003 have largely escaped criticism. That, however, is starting to change. Chief among the targets is Gen. John Abizaid, who succeeded Franks as head of Central Command, the military region that covers most of the Middle East and includes Afghanistan and Iraq.

Senior and mid-level officers — all of whom either fought in Iraq or were involved in operations there, and none of whom were willing to be identified by name — are beginning to assert privately that Abizaid and other top generals must inevitably share responsibility for the setbacks in Iraq. Many of those officers have lost men on the battlefield in Iraq and saw their requests for more troops go unheeded. Others worked in positions where they saw the planning for Iraq or the execution of the war go wrong. "Iraq will go down as the greatest military and strategic blunder since Vietnam," says a former officer who dealt with Iraq planning. "And no one has ever been held accountable — including senior military leaders."

In a culture that values accountability and leadership, the military has been slow to look inward on Iraq. The fact that no senior officer has admitted to any serious mistakes, or been reprimanded or sidelined for tactical, operational or strategic errors, is troubling to many officers. In contrast, they point to the example of Israel, which had barely withdrawn all its troops from southern Lebanon before it launched investigations into the conduct of the war against Hizballah.

There have been previous suggestions of military missteps. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice touched a nerve in April when she said the U.S. had made "thousands of tactical errors" in Iraq. But many officers dismissed her comments as coming from a civilian politician. Others have criticized the military leaders for failing to dispute the flawed war plan set in motion by the President and his top advisers. "Flaws in our civilians are one thing; the failure of the Pentagon's military leaders is quite another," former Marine Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold wrote in TIME last spring. "Those are men who know the hard consequences of war but, with few exceptions, acted timidly when their voices urgently needed to be heard."

But in the past few months, a growing number of officers have expanded their criticism to the way the generals have conducted the war. Gen. George Casey, who has been in command in Iraq for more than two years, has been the target of some of these complaints. But he came to Iraq when the situation had already degenerated into a complex insurgent fight. More criticism is being directed at Abizaid, who was a key military planner for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon before becoming Director of the Joint Staff, and then No. 2 at CENTCOM to Gen. Franks.

On paper, Abizaid was the right officer at the right moment. An Arab-American graduate of West Point, Abizaid studied in the Middle East, speaks some Arabic (though he is far from fluent) and commanded troops with distinction in Grenada and Gulf War I. Even today, many senior and retired officers speak of Abizaid with reverence; Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has praised him as an "outstanding officer"; and not even his harshest critics question his commitment to service.

It is his military judgment that has raised questions. As Franks' second in command, some officers say, Abizaid shares the blame for the failure to plan for what would happen after the initial rush to Baghdad. But his more serious missteps, in the view of his critics, began when Abizaid took over from Franks in July 2003, two months after the infamous "end of major combat operations" speech by President George Bush. Among those mistakes: failing to keep enough troops in Iraq in the fall of 2003 to establish basic security; allowing the disbanding of the Iraq Army and de-Baathificaition; missing the first signs of a growing insurgency; and failing to replace commanders who couldn't adapt to fight the insurgency, including Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former top ground commander in Iraq who was allowed to quietly retire this year.

Abizaid is also accused of mismanaging the campaign in Fallujah in April 2004. Following the gruesome killing of four contractors, he pressured the Marines — over their objections — to attack the town. Then he compounded the mistake, in the view of these officers, when, faced with complaints from the Iraqis and Arab media about high civilian casualties, he abruptly halted the attack, violating the usual practice of allowing commanders on the ground to control the tactical fight. Many analysts see it as a turning point that allowed the insurgency to expand and become more dangerous.

Abizaid is also drawing criticism for never asking, so far as anyone knows, for a significant increase in troops to impose security. Abizaid, says a former officer privy to details of miiltary operations, "never wanted to commit more troops to Iraq." Early on he said the U.S. was an "antibody" in the Iraqi body politic and supported early "off-ramps" from Iraq for our forces. Officers who served in Iraq say they asked for more forces several times, but those requests did not make it to the top. At least twice in meetings with President Bush in 2004 — once before the April 2004 Fallujah attack and again before another operation there in November — the President asked Abizaid if he had everything he needed and Abizaid said, "Yes sir."

Abizaid, says one critic, also failed to develop a successful strategy of clearing an area, then holding it with troops, and then rebuilding its social and economic institutions. He believed that the rebuilding ought to be left to the Iraqis, but he never ensured that the foundation of that strategy — the Iraqi Security Forces — were up to the job, this critic contends.

Even today, some officers say, Abizaid continues to speak in terms that don't match the fight on the ground in Iraq. "U.S. forces have never been defeated in a fight at platoon level or above and we never will," he told a military group last month. He's still missing the point, says one frustrated officer: "It's an irrelevant comparison because those types of encounters are rare or nonexistent in Iraq." Says another officer: "We're not fighting the Big Red Soviet Army here, we're dealing with hit-and-run guerrilla warfare."

Abizaid did not reply when asked by TIME to comment on the criticism.

Abizaid does get credit, in the view of his critics, for being more honest about the facts on the ground, in many cases, than his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In the summer of 2003, after Rumsfeld had denied Iraq was facing an insurgency, Abizaid made his first appearance in the Pentagon press briefing room and boldly countered that in fact the U.S. was facing a guerrilla war. And last August, before Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, it was Abizaid who said Iraq was "as bad as I've ever seen it," and that it may be on the verge of civil war.

But Abizaid has also been a smart politician. He has never challenged the assertion by senior civilian leaders that the war was being won. The Abu Ghraib scandal did not scar him. The fact that Osama Bin Laden is still at large in the middle of his region of responsibility never really lands on his shoulders.

He also has carefully escaped responsibility for the failures in Iraq. One retired senior army officer shook his head and said, "John has been unacceptably distant from the issue of Iraq." Abizaid has allowed Gen. George Casey, the Iraq commander, to take the heat as questions about strategy — over which he has the ultimate responsibility — are raised in Washington. As the Iraq war grinds on, senior officers who have served in Iraq are reaching their own conclusions about Abizaid's role. Said one Iraq veteran: "I don't think history will treat John Abizaid well."

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 113
October 30, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Support Secrecy News:
http://www.fas.org/static/contrib_sec.jsp


** DOD CONTRACTOR IMPROPERLY BLOCKED RELEASE OF INFO
** PUBLIC INTEREST DECLASSIFICATION BOARD STALLS
** CRS ON PAKISTAN-US RELATIONS, MORE


DOD CONTRACTOR IMPROPERLY BLOCKED RELEASE OF INFO

In an unusual investigation of improper secrecy involving
unclassified information, an Inspector General report last week
found that a Defense Department contractor marked records as
"proprietary data," thereby restricting their dissemination, even
though the records did not qualify as proprietary.

Kellogg, Brown and Root Services, Inc. (KBR), a component of
Halliburton, "routinely marks almost all of the information it
provides to the government as KBR proprietary data," the Special
Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found.

This is not consistent with Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR),
the IG said.

"The routine use of proprietary markings when the data marked is not
internal contractor information... is an abuse of FAR procedures
[and] inhibits transparency of government activities and the use of
taxpayer funds...," the Inspector General reported.

"The result is that information normally releasable to the public
must be protected from public release..."

"In effect, KBR has turned FAR provisions designed to protect truly
proprietary information ... into a mechanism to prevent the
government from releasing normally transparent information, thus
potentially hindering competition and oversight," the Inspector
General concluded.

See "Interim Audit Report on Inappropriate Use of Proprietary Data
Markings by the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program Contractor,"
Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction,
October 26, 2006:

http://www.sigir.mil/reports/pdf/audits/06-035.pdf

Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root unit won a $17 billion contract in
2001 to provide services to the U.S. Army worldwide that includes
over $15.4 billion for Iraq work, noted Tony Capaccio in a report
for Bloomberg News. "While KBR has been criticized for its
accounting practices, bills and estimates of future costs, this
audit is the first to cite it for restricting information," he
wrote.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=new...id=aPgSZWxN2kyo

While national security classification procedures are governed by
certain rules and procedures, including a degree of external
oversight, the same is not consistently true of the dozens of
control markings (such as "proprietary data" or "for official use
only") that are increasingly imposed on unclassified information.

So, for example, there are well-defined procedures for
declassification of classified information, but there are no such
procedures for lifting controls on many varieties of "sensitive but
unclassified" information.

And while the Information Security Oversight Office is responsible
for oversight of classification and declassification activity, no
one is similarly responsible for monitoring restrictions on
unclassified information that is withheld from the public. It would
be surprising if such restrictions were not abused, since they can
serve as a shield against oversight and accountability.

The new Inspector General report suggests that this is a function
that might regularly be assumed by agency Inspectors General.

A House Government Reform Subcommittee held a hearing last March on
the proliferation of controls on unclassified information and their
consequences. The record of that hearing has recently been
published.

See "Drowning in a Sea of Faux Secrets: Policies on Handling of
Classified and Sensitive Information,"House Committee on Government
Reform, March 14, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2006/faux.html


PUBLIC INTEREST DECLASSIFICATION BOARD STALLS

Confronted for the first time by a congressional request to review
the classification of two congressional reports, the new Public
Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) has been stymied by doubts
over its own authority to proceed.

The PIDB was formally created by statute in 2000 to serve as an
advisory body on declassification priorities and policies. Its
controlling statute was modified in the intelligence reform
legislation of 2004, when its members began to be named, but it
first received funding in fiscal year 2006.

In September, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and other members of the
Senate Intelligence Committee including its chairman Sen. Pat
Roberts (R-KS), asked the Board to review the controversial
classification of portions of two committee reports on pre-war Iraq
intelligence, contending that those documents were overclassified.
It was the Board's first such tasking (Secrecy News, 09/15/06).

Under the terms of the amended statute, the Board now says it cannot
act on the congressional request without specific Presidential
approval.

"The statute under which we operate provides that [President Bush]
must request the board undertake such a review before it can
proceed," wrote L. Britt Snider, chairman of the Public Interest
Declassification Board, in a letter to Sen. Wyden.

In effect, it appears, the Bush Administration must authorize the
Board's investigation of whether the Bush Administration
overclassified the reports in question.

See "Anti-secrecy panel called 'puppet'," by Shaun Waterman, United
Press International, October 30:

http://washingtontimes.com/national/200610...15609-8893r.htm

Some aspects of the dilemma were reported by Tim Starks in
Congressional Quarterly on October 20, and elaborated by Nick
Schwellenbach of the Project on Government Oversight in "Public
Interest Declassification Board: Who's the Boss?":

http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2006/10/p...c_interest.html


CRS ON PAKISTAN-US RELATIONS, MORE

Some recent products of the Congressional Research Service, not made
directly available to the public, include the following.

"Pakistan-U.S. Relations," updated October 26, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33498.pdf

"Pakistan: Chronology of Recent Events," updated October 20, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RS21584.pdf

"Western Sahara: Status of Settlement Efforts," updated September 29,
2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RS20962.pdf



_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.
Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists
web: www.fas.org/sgp/index.html
email: saftergood@fas.org
voice: (202) 454-4691

ARMY MONITORS SOLDIERS' BLOGS, WEBSITES - MICHAEL FELBERBAUM, ASSOCIATED PRESS (USA TODAY, OCTOBER 30): From the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan to here at home, soldiers blogging about military life are under the watchful eye of some of their own. A Virginia-based operation, the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell, monitors official and unofficial blogs and other websites for anything that may compromise security.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-10-...-blogging_x.htm

Meanwhile, a nasty spat erupted between Snow and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., over remarks Kerry made Monday during an appearance in California. Snow alleged the comments were an insult to the troops. "You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make the effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq," Kerry reportedly said. "What Sen. Kerry ought to do first is apologize to the troops," Snow said. "The clear implication here is: If you flunk out, if you don't study hard, if you don't do your homework, if you don't make an effort to be smart and you don't do well, you, quote, 'get stuck in Iraq.'"
Kerry issued an unusually scathing written response that seemed to suggest he was talking about Bush. "If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they're crazy," Kerry said. He added: "I'm not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country, lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have." -- by Keith Koffler
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

November 1, 2006
Move Over, GI Joe and
Han Solo
by Elizabeth de la Vega and Tom Engelhardt
Tom Dispatch
It's hard even to remember anymore the true state of the U.S. military as the Vietnam War ground toward its bloody end. By the late 1960s, the statistics flowing back to Washington about the American war machine were enough to give any general nightmares. Drug-taking was rampant. (By 1971, up to 60 percent of returning soldiers admitted to some use.) Desertions stood at 70 per 1,000, a modern high; small-scale mutinies or "combat refusals" were at critical levels; incidents of racial conflict had soared; and strife between officers ("lifers") and soldiers ("grunts") was at unprecedented levels; reported "fraggings" – assassination attempts – against unpopular officers or NCOs had risen from an already startling 126 in 1969 to 333 in 1971, despite declining troop strength in Vietnam. According to military count, as many as 144 underground newspapers were then being published by, or aimed at, soldiers. ("In Vietnam," the Ft. Lewis-McChord Free Press typically wrote, "the Lifers, the Brass, are the true Enemy, not the enemy.") And the country was experiencing the largest political exodus of potential soldiers, AWOLs, and deserters since large numbers of Tories left the country 200 years earlier, after the American Revolution.

In 1971, Col. Robert D. Heinl Jr. reviewed the evidence for Armed Forces Journal in an article entitled "The Collapse of the Armed Forces," and concluded: "[T]he foregoing facts point to widespread conditions among American forces in Vietnam that have only been exceeded in this century by the French Army's Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of he Tsarist armies [of Russia] in 1916 and 1917." Hardly less threatening to military cohesion at the time, active-duty soldiers in relatively small numbers as well as significant numbers of Vietnam veterans were by then beginning to organize against the war.

If you want part of the explanation for why the Vietnam War ended and all of the explanation for why the draft that once did result in a genuine citizen's army was abandoned for an all-volunteer military, look no further than this traumatic set of events. And it's been true that, whatever the problems – and they've been multifold – staffing an overstretched volunteer military to fight two increasingly unpopular wars without end in Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam-style unrest in the military has been slower to grow. But there's nothing like a losing war in an alien land among an increasingly hostile populace to throw one's worst acts into strong relief. So, despite the obstacles, small but growing numbers of American soldiers – like Lt. Ehren Watada, "the Army's first commissioned officer to publicly refuse orders to fight in Iraq on grounds that the war is illegal" – have stepped forward to challenge the Bush administration, its war-making, and the military. Their often lonely acts of resistance reflect an extra degree of courage in comparison with the Vietnam era – and where it's been difficult for them, military families as well as parents of the American dead in Iraq like Cindy Sheehan have heroically stepped into the void.

Former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega, whose new book U.S. v. George W. Bush et al. will be published this December (and highlighted at this site), considers one of these new military resisters in her own unique way. If you want to look for "profiles in courage" in the age of Bush and Cheney, this is certainly a good place to start. Tom

Sgt. Ricky Clousing, Peace Action Hero
by Elizabeth de la Vega

I look forward to the day when Mattel makes a Sgt. Ricky Clousing action figure.

As the mother of sons born eight years apart, I spent nearly half my adult life surrounded by – and stepping on – action figures. They were everywhere: a phalanx of tiny knights in shining armor on the windowsill; Batman and Robin frozen in an ice tray; and GI Joe guys in camouflage among the hosta. One Christmas, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo even ended up in the manger scene along with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, two cows, three sheep, and several Ewoks. My kids spent hours and hours in a fantasy world populated by villains and heroes of every description except one; there were no peace heroes.

I met a peace hero at Camp Democracy in Washington, D.C., not too long ago: Sgt. Ricky Clousing. He will not remember me, but I will not forget him. On a brilliant, blessedly unhumid day, Ricky sat on a makeshift platform within shouting distance of the Lincoln Memorial and told a story that was simultaneously agonizing and inspiring to hear.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Ricky was working in an orphanage and "building some roads and stuff" in Thailand. When his stint as a volunteer ended, he made his way to Germany, where he met American soldiers returning from Afghanistan. Caught up in the wave of post-9/11 patriotism, he decided he would join the Army rather than return to college in his native Seattle. That way he could serve his country and have money for his education when he got out. Two years later, having completed basic training and intensive language instruction at the Monterey Defense Language Institute, Sgt. Ricky Clousing found himself in Baghdad, an interrogator with the 82nd Airborne Division out of Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.

As a tactical interrogator assigned to question detainees at the scene of infantry raids, Ricky did not witness the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. What he did witness, however, was hardly less horrifying: American soldiers indoctrinated to view Iraqis as less than human, as "ragheads" or worse; American soldiers out on the streets of the Iraqi capital ramming the cars of Iraqi civilians for sport; American soldiers laughing as they slaughtered the livestock of local farmers; and American soldiers shooting an Iraqi teenager who had simply made a wrong turn.

Ricky was on patrol when he saw a boy, "probably 18 years old, a small, maybe high-school age kid" turn down a road his unit was attempting to secure. The teenager, Ricky said, was quite visibly terrified at the sight of "a whole bunch of Americans with big weapons" staring him in the face. He started turning the car around, but didn't get very far. This is how Ricky described what happened next:

"One of the soldiers in the turret of the Humvee behind me just opened up fire on the machine gun on the vehicle. As the vehicle was turning away, all I heard above my head was 'pop, pop, pop, pop.' This was my first deployment, my first combat experience was that moment right then, and just the sound of machine guns going off over my head. He popped about five or six rounds in the side of the vehicle. Myself and two of the other guys ran over to the vehicle, smashed the window, and pulled the guy out to provide first aid on him… I was looking down at this kid who had just been shot in the stomach for no reason really – he was trying to leave… I was still just standing there in shock, looking down at this kid, and he looked right up at me. And his mouth was foaming. His stomach was falling out in his hands… I was looking down at this kid, this young boy who was just trying to drive around town and took a wrong turn and tried to go the other direction, was shot at and killed, and I'm looking down at him now. And we made eye contact for about five seconds, and he just looked at me with the most empty, terrified look in his face that will never leave me in my whole life I'm sure."

That Iraqi boy died on the way to the hospital. I think the boy in Ricky Clousing died that day as well, but what an extraordinary man he has since become. Deciding he would be haunted forever if he kept silent about such an egregious violation of the rules of engagement, Sgt. Clousing notified the unit's platoon sergeant, who did not "take kindly" to his advice.

Clousing continued to object to American war crimes for the rest of his time in Iraq, though no one ever took kindly to his objections. When he returned to the U.S., he talked to his commanding officers, to the chaplain, to mental health workers and anyone else who would listen to his problems with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He was told he could get out of the Army – if he said he was gay. But he couldn't say that because he's not gay. He was told to claim he had post-traumatic stress disorder, but he couldn't do that because he didn't think he had PTSD. He was told to file as a conscientious objector; but he couldn't do that because he wasn't against all war. He was told he could avoid going back to Iraq by taking an assignment in the United States. He couldn't do that either because – and this is exactly what Ricky Clousing told us on that sunny afternoon in Washington:

"I felt that my involvement in the Army, whether it be directly or indirectly, whether in Iraq or training guys to go to Iraq, I was still that piece of machine in the system that was still allowing this war to take place and still supporting that. My actions, whether or not they were on the front line or back safely at home, were still part of the body of the machine that's occupying [Iraq]. So I ultimately felt that the only thing I could do was to leave, so I packed my stuff last June and I went AWOL."

On Aug. 11, 2006, the day he turned himself in, Sgt. Clousing made a simple statement:

"We have found ourselves in a pivotal era where we have traded humanity for patriotism. Where we have traded our civil liberties for a sense of security. I stand here before you sharing the same idea as Henry David Thoreau: as a soldier, as an American, and as a human being, we mustn't lend ourselves to that same evil which we condemn."

Ricky Clousing – now serving a three-month sentence in a military brig at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina – is not the only peace hero. Others are making themselves known in growing numbers and you can read about them at the Courage to Resist Web site. Although we have no way of assessing the numbers from here, I have no doubt that there are also soldiers trying to do the right thing in Iraq.

But when I read about a president who doesn't know the meaning of "outrages upon human dignity" because he so clearly does not consider the very people he claims to have liberated human; when I read about a vice president who does not even have the courage to admit to the meaning of the words he uses ("dunk in the water," "last throes"); when I read about a defense secretary who tells reporters to back off if the questions get too tough, then I think about Ricky Clousing.

Twenty-four years old, Clousing told the world in simple declarative sentences why he had to give up his college money, receive a dishonorable discharge, and go to jail to take a stand against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He'd make a very cool action figure. Come to think of it, Sgt. Ricky Clousing – tattooed arms, Laguna Beach T-shirt, and all – would make an awesome shepherd in that manger scene. Han Solo and Luke Skywalker are just going to have to move over.

Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with over 20 years of experience. Her pieces have appeared in the Nation magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon. She writes regularly for TomDispatch and is the author of the upcoming book U.S. v. George W. Bush et al., a TomDispatch project to be published by Seven Stories Press in late November. She may be contacted at ElizabethdelaVega@Verizon.net.

Copyright 2006 Elizabeth de la Vega

http://www.counterpunch.org/humes10312006.html

America's Disservice to Veterans
Nine Words
By EDWARD HUMES

When Ronald Reagan convinced the nation that the nine most dangerous words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help, the Gipper knew better, even if his audience didn't. Reagan was a member of the WW II generation and half his colleagues in Hollywood, from Newman to McQueen to Matthau, got their educations, training and first homes through the biggest of big government programs, the G.I. Bill.

Yet Reagan's 1980s laugh line has become 21st century conventional wisdom, justification for slashing and spurning every government cause that doesn't have pork on its label ­ shortchanging even the veterans our current leadership claims to support.

Consider these two contrasting images to understand just how far we've sunk since June 1944, when Franklin Roosevelt signed the original G.I. Bill: After World War II, millions of veterans lined up for hours for a remarkable purpose: to register for free college educations, to buy homes with no money down and mortgages cheaper than rent, to sign up for vocational training and job counseling, and to apply for business and farm loans -- all courtesy of Uncle Sam and the original G.I. Bill. In the wake of the Iraq war and occupation, very different but no less remarkable lines now snake across many military bases nationwide: bread lines.

This is the dirty secret in a war filled with them: Thousands of military families have been left so desperate they must queue up for donations of surplus cheese, day-old bread and damaged boxes of frozen food. This is especially true for bases in areas with high costs of living, such as the Marines' Camp Pendleton near San Diego, where food lines have become a weekly fixture. When our warriors come home from Iraq, all too many find empty bank accounts, maxed-out credit cards and the realization that the college benefits used to entice enlistees won't cover the costs of a 4-year degree, nor support their families while they're in class. Still others, wounded in a war costing the country $10 million an hour, learn that their president and Congress have cut programs to heal their injuries, post-combat stress, and economic distress. "It is a scandal," says Paul Rieckhoff, director of the Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America. "You can be sent to Rikers Island (New York's jail), and you'll get better transitional assistance when you get released than you do getting out of the Marines."

Sadly, this is not merely a story of slighted veterans, but of America's dismal failure to invest in its future. Just imagine how a politician today would be pilloried if he proposed offering an entire generation free college, subsidized mortgages, job training and medical care. Why that would be a costly boondoggle, outright social engineering ­ it would violate Reagan's dictum that government isn't the solution, it's the problem.

Today's unthinkable was yesterday's matter of course. In the midst of war, FDR and Congress overwhelmingly passed the bipartisan G.I. Bill to aid 16 million veterans ­ 1 out of 8 Americans ­ rebuild their lives. But this investment in America's future powered far more than a return to the status quo. It transformed the nation and the American Dream. It opened up the colleges (formerly elite bastions), raised suburbs out of bean fields (a nation of renters became a nation of homeowners), grew the middle class (from 1 in 10 before the war to 1 in 3 a decade after), and provided the medical, engineering and scientific prowess to conquer dread diseases, usher in the information age, and win the Cold War.

Such luminaries as Bob Dole, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, William Rehnquist, Warren Christopher, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, and George McGovern, among many others, got their starts through the G.I. Bill, as did 14 Nobel Prize winners, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 450,000 engineers and a million assorted lawyers, nurses, businessmen, artists, actors, writers and pilots. We seem to have forgotten that it was not unfettered free markets that transformed postwar America so much as a massive government program that intervened mightily in the housing, lending and education businesses, pushing (and subsidizing) them in ways they had long resisted ­ spreading the wealth as never before. Or since.

Costly? Sure, but the G.I.Bill was truly a hand-up, not a hand-out. It more than paid for itself. A 1988 congressional study found that every dollar spent on education under the bill returned $7 through increased productivity, consumer spending and tax revenue. Fifty billion (in today's dollars) earned a $350 billion return. Unlike the $450 billion and counting being flushed down the Iraq drain, the G.I. Bill left us safer, stronger, more united, and more prosperous. That's called investing in the future -- not for the next quarter, but the next quarter century.

The original GI Bill had sweeping power because it touched a whole generation. Today's pale imitation reaches less than 1% of Americans. Decency and patriotism demand that it be strengthened, and our vets deserve every cent. But short of world war and a massive draft, it will never again be the same engine of opportunity. And America needs such an engine.

Before he died, FDR had a solution: national service. Young people would do good while earning education, medical, housing and pension benefits -- not just veterans, but everyone, a civilian GI Bill. Polls suggested a receptive public, but the idea died with Roosevelt. Bill Clinton tried a modest resurrection with his AmeriCorps project. Much more is needed.

In an era when college is a growing financial burden for families, when home ownership grows less affordable each day, when we are losing our competitive edge in advanced degrees, and when the American Dream so generously nurtured after World War II is under siege, it is time again to expect greatness from our government ­ our common enterprise, our commonwealth. It is time to realize Reagan's old saw was not truism but self-fulfilling prophecy. Before he convinced us otherwise, our magnificent American government bested the Great Depression, created Social Security, won WW II, ended racial segregation, eradicated the scourges of polio and small pox, harnessed the atom, put a man on the moon, invented the internet, rebuilt war-ravaged Europe and Japan with the Marshall Plan, and raised America to new heights with the visionary G.I. Bill. Such is the legacy of greatness we inherited.

Now, for the first time in our history, polls show that Americans expect their children to inherit less prosperous lives than the current generation, a direct result of our embrace of those nine dangerous words. Is that really the legacy we want to leave behind?

Edward Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream (Harcourt 2006). He has contributed to Talk, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Los Angeles magazine, and others. Humes's numerous other books include School of Dreams and the bestselling Mississippi Mud, Mean Justice, and No Matter How Loud I Shout. For more information, visit www.edwardhumes.com

IRAQ: U.S. Military Adopts Desperate Tactics
Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily
FALLUJAH - Increased violence is being countered by harsh new measures across the Sunni-dominated al-Anabar province west of Baghdad, residents say.
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35312

Government Death Squads Ravaging Baghdad
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35159

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1031-24.htm

Bush Losing Support of Military
by Bob Burnett

One of the most memorable Iraq war images was President Bush's May 1, 2003, speech from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. As Bush announced, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," framed by the banner, "Mission Accomplished," he was surrounded by hundreds of cheering troops. At the time, it would have been hard to predict that three years later major combat operations would not have ended, the mission would not be accomplished, and Bush would be losing the support of the military.

How did George Bush manage to lose the backing of our armed forces, which at one time was highly supportive of his Administration?

Four factors contributed to this change: First, the occupation of Iraq was botched. Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor's recent book, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq argues the Administration "committed five grievous errors" during the planning and execution of the invasion: "They underestimated their opponent and failed to understand the welter of ethnic groups and tribes that is Iraq." "They did not bring the right tools to the fight and put too much confidence in technology." "They failed to adapt to developments on the ground;" did not recognize the rise of the insurgency. "They presided over a system in which differing military and political perspectives were discouraged." Finally, "they turned their backs onŠ nation-building."

Second, the Bush Administration's failure to "bring the right tools to the fight" directly impacted rank-and-file troops. Particularly in the early days of the occupation, most had inadequate equipment. A recent poll indicated that 42 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans "said their equipment was below the military standard of being 90 percent operational."

Third, the longer our troops stayed in Iraq the more they became aware that most Iraqis didn't want them there. A recent poll indicated that 71 percent of Iraqis want occupation forces to leave within a year. Further, 60 percent supported attacks on US-led forces.

And fourth, increasing numbers of retired Army and Marine generals began to express opposition to the war. (It's a violation of the Uniform code of Military Justice for an active-duty officer to criticize the President or anyone in the chain of military command.)

The Administration attempted to keep a lid on this discontent. As a result, there have been very few surveys that asked active-duty troops how they felt about the war. The most recent poll indicated that 72 percent of active-duty personnel believed the war should end in 2006. A more recent survey indicated that 53 percent "did not always know who the enemy was."

Increasing numbers of soldiers have gone AWOL or asked for Conscientious Objector status. In October, military personnel began adding their names to a web-based petition calling for withdrawal from Iraq. Active duty troops have begun to speak against the war.

The most notable recent comment came from Kevin Tillman on October 19th. Kevin is the brother of former pro football star, Pat Tillman, who killed in Afghanistan on April 22. 2004. Both brothers enlisted after September 11, 2001, and initially served in Iraq; then they were trained as Army Rangers and sent to Afghanistan. Kevin said, "Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground."

One of the reasons the military has turned on the Bush Administration is the increasing number of wounded troops. There have been more than 21,000 such casualties, in addition to the more than 2800 deaths. The Bush Administration prohibits pictures of coffins returning from Iraq. They've also told the Department of Veteran's Affairs to not give out the names of the wounded. Democratic Congressman John Murtha noted that in addition to the soldiers' grievous physical injuries,"50,000 will suffer from what I call battle fatigue." In July 2004, the PBS News Hour reported, "about one-sixth of troops returning from Iraq showed symptoms of mental health problems but many are not receiving treatment." ( A recent study indicated these injuries will cost the US more than $1 trillion.)

Of course, Active-duty troops are being required to spend multiple tours of duty in Iraq. This has increased their financial and psychological problems. Recently, Stars and Stripes reported the divorce rate for Iraqi veterans jumped from 9 to 15 percent and alcohol abuse rose from 13 percent to 21 percent.

Last year, decorated combat veteran John Murtha came out against the war in Iraq. One of his reasons was the damage the occupation is doing to the military. Murtha spoke movingly of his visits with returning veterans. He concluded, "Our military is suffering."

It is this suffering, the consequences of an ill conceived and tragically mishandled war, that cost the Bush Administration the support of our troops.

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer. He can be reached at bobburnett@comcast.net

The U.S. Body Count in Iraq

In the month of October 2006, 104 Americans in uniform died in the war in Iraq. That makes this October the fourth most deadly month in Iraq for Americans since the war began in March 2003. (In April 2004, 135 Americans were killed; in November 2004 there were 137 killed; and in January 2005, it was 107). While it is impersonal to manipulate the statistics, it is also informative.

The Department of Defense (DOD) has made available significant data on the dead and wounded from the war. Among others, two particularly useful entities have analyzed DOD’s and other data to help us understand the numbers. One is the website for the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count at http://icasualties.org/oif/default.aspx; another is a study released last August by the Population Studies Center of the University of Pennsylvania: “Mortality of American Troops in Iraq.” It can be found at http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewconten..._working_papers. The material below summaries their data (and provides additional links to them).

Total Dead: As of Nov. 1, 2006, 2,817 Americans have died in Iraq of all causes; 239 military personnel have been killed from other countries (U.K.: 120; “other:” 119), for a grand total of 3,055 casualties from the coalition forces. (See these and more data at http://icasualties.org/oif/.)

The data at www.icasualties.org for American military fatalities include:

2,268 deaths from hostile fire, which occurs in many forms; and
550 non-combat deaths.

Among the deaths resulting from hostile fire:

improvised explosive devices (IEDs) caused at least 998, or 35 percent of all deaths, which exceeds all other causes.

Although the other subcategories at www.icasulaties.org includes some causes listed more than once and other poorly organized or unexplained entries (from what DOD appears to have provided), other hostile fire causes attributed in the data include:

unspecified hostile fire: 425, or 15 percent;
small arms fire: 272, or 10 percent;
mortar attacks: 85, or 3 percent;
rocket propelled grenades (RPGs): 104, or 4 percent;
cars bombs: 76, or 3 percent;
suicide car bombs: 54, or 2 percent;
other suicide bombers: 30, or 1 percent.

The leading cause of non-hostile deaths were vehicle accidents (201 deaths, or 7 percent of the total). Other causes included:

helicopter accidents: 74, or 3 percent;
weapon accidents: 76, or 3 percent.
“friendly fire:” 8, or 0.3 percent;
homicides: 7, or 0.2 percent; and
suicides: 3, or 0.1 percent.

(See various details at http://icasualties.org/oif/Stats.aspx.)

Wounded: Contrary to the approximate 20,000 wounded that the press typically reports, the www.icasualties.org website reports the following:

14,414 wounded – no medical air transport required;
6,273 wounded – medical air transport required;
6,430 non-hostile injuries – medical air transport required;
17,662 diseases – medical air transport required.

Assuming medical air transport is an indicator of serious wounds, injuries, or sickness, these data can also be described as follows:

6,273 seriously wounded;
6,430 seriously injured in non-hostile events (e.g. vehicle accidents)
17,662 seriously ill (e.g. serious heat prostration)
A total of 30,365 seriously wounded, injured, or sick – all causes.

For those not receiving medical air transport:

14,414 wounded who could be treated without air evacuation.

Grand Total: 44,779. (See http://www.icasualties.org/oif/default.aspx.)

Thus, counting all forms of wounds, injuries, and illness, the total “casualties” are more than twice the number typically reported in the press.

Branch of Service Fatalities: The distribution of U.S. fatalities by branch of service, as reported by www.icasualties.org, is as follows:

Army (active duty): 1,435
Marines (active duty): 712
Army National Guard: 377
Army Reserve: 103
Marine Reserve: 97
Navy: 46
Air Force: 25
Navy Reserve: 13
Coast Guard: 1
Air National Guard: 1
Department of the Army: 4
Department of the Air Force: 2
Department of Defense: 1

(See http://www.icasualties.org/oif/Service.aspx.)

Using data for the period between March 21, 2003, and March 31, 2006, the University of Pennsylvania study provides some analysis of these numbers, as follows:

Compared to the war in Vietnam, the chances U.S. military personnel will be killed in Iraq are significantly lower. With 56,838 deaths over a period of 2,608,650 “person-years of exposure,” the Vietnam “death rate” was 21.8 per 1,000, compared to 3.9 for Iraq. Vietnam was 5.6 times more deadly for deployed troops as Iraq. Reasons cited in the study for the difference are improvements in military medicine, faster evacuation to closer medical care, and more and better body armor. (It is also possible – but not reported in the study – that the nature of the combat in Vietnam was different – and perhaps more lethal. For example, U.S. combat training may now be better, or the enemy may have been more dangerous.)
The number of deaths compared to the number wounded was also higher in Vietnam; 0.24 in Vietnam; 0.13 in Iraq, presumably for the same reasons the study articulated.
The death rates for branch of service in Iraq also vary considerably:
the risk of death is greatest in Iraq for Marines (both active and reserve) at 8.5 per 1,000;
Army (active and reserve) personnel are experiencing 3.4 deaths per 1,000 deployed;
Navy personnel are less exposed at a rate of 0.83;
Air Force personnel are the least exposed at a rate of 0.4.
The average death rate across all services is 3.9.
Put another way, the chance of a deployed armed services member dying in Iraq is one out of every 255 per year.

The comparable death rate for military age civilian males in the U.S. is 1.5 per 1,000, about 40 percent less than that of military personnel in Iraq.

Rank: Generals and admirals in Iraq are safer than their age cohort is in America; none have died in Iraq. However:

30 majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels have died;
156 lieutenants and captains have died;
the vast majority of the dead are:
sergeants (738 dead); and
privates, corporals, and specialists (1,359 dead).

(See the absolute data for all ranks at http://www.icasualties.org/oif/Stats.aspx.)

The University of Pennsylvania study assessed the relative risk:

Army and Marine enlisted personnel have 40 percent and 36 percent higher mortality than all officers, respectively.
However, Army and Marine lieutenants, who typically lead combat patrols, have a higher mortality rate than more senior officers and enlisted personnel; Army and Marine lieutenants have a mortality rate 19 percent and 11 percent higher, respectively, than all personnel in their respective branches of service.

Gender: All but 64 of the deaths in Iraq have been males. With women not permitted to hold positions primarily intended for combat, their mortality is 5.5 times less that of males.

Race and Ethnicity: The University of Pennsylvania study reports that DOD’s data do not make analysis of mortality across race and ethnicity easy; the study did, however, find that:

Hispanics have a mortality rate 21 percent higher than non-Hispanics;
blacks have a mortality rate about 60 percent that of whites, and less than 50 percent the rate of “other” ethnicities (American Indian, others natives, and “multi-race.”)

The study did not explain the higher Hispanic mortality rate but did explain the lower mortality rate for black personnel as a result of higher representation in categories with less exposure to combat, such as the female gender and perhaps technical or support services.

Other Categories: Icasualties.org reports a “partial list” of 367 civilian contractors from all non-Iraqi nationalities as fatalities and 116 fatalities among journalists from all nations.

As Republican and Democratic candidates for elective office position themselves on the politics of the war in Iraq for advantage in the upcoming congressional elections, it is useful to inform ourselves about who and how many are experiencing the real risks. Currently, the politicians are waiting for a more favorable environment after the elections to sort out what they are actually going to do, if anything, about the war; meanwhile, the military personnel in Iraq – all of them – have more important things to worry about.


Author(s): Winslow Wheeler

Winslow T. Wheeler
Director
Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information
202 797-5271 in DC
301 840-8992 in MD
winslowwheeler@comcast.net

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/world/mi...ref=todayspaper
Tending a Fallen Marine, With Skill, Prayer and Fury

Joao Silva for The New York Times
Petty Officer Third Class Dustin E. Kirby, an American medic, with the sniper’s bullet that wounded a member of his platoon in Iraq.

KARMA, Iraq, Oct. 30 — Petty Officer Third Class Dustin E. Kirby clutched the injured marine’s empty helmet. His hands were coated in blood. Sweat ran down his face, which he was trying to keep straight but kept twisting into a snarl.
Petty Officer Third Class Dustin E. Kirby, at far left in foreground, and members of his platoon prayed for Lance Cpl. Colin Smith, who was wounded by a sniper.

He held up the helmet and flipped it, exposing the inside. It was lined with blood and splinters of bone.

“The round hit him,” he said, pausing to point at a tiny hole that aligned roughly with a man’s temple. “Right here.”

Petty Officer Kirby, 22, is a Navy corpsman, the trauma medic assigned to Second Mobile Assault Platoon of Weapons Company, Second Battalion, Eighth Marines. Everyone calls him Doc. He had just finished treating a marine who had been shot by an Iraqi sniper.

“It was 7.62 millimeter,” he continued. “Armor piercing.”

He reached into his pocket and retrieved the bullet, which he had found. “The impact with the Kevlar stopped most of it,” he said. “But it tore through, hit his head, went through and came out.”

He put the bullet in his breast pocket, to give to an intelligence team later. Sweat kept rolling off his face, mixed with tears. His voice was almost cracking, but he managed to control it and keep it deep. “When I got there, there wasn’t much I could do,” he said.

Then he nodded. He seemed to be talking to himself. “I kept him breathing,” he said.

He looked at Lance Cpl. Matias Tafoya, his driver, and raised his voice. It was almost a shout. “When I told you that I do not let people die on me, I meant it,” he said. “I meant it.”

He scanned the Iraqi houses, perhaps 150 yards away, on the other side of a fetid green canal. Marines were all around, pressed to the ground, peering from behind machine-gun turrets or bracing against their armored vehicles, aiming rifles at where they thought the sniper was.

The sniper had made a single shot just as the marines were leaving a rural settlement on the western edge of Karma, a city near Falluja in Anbar Province.

The marines had been searching several houses on this side of the canal, where they found five Kalashnikov assault rifles and bomb components, and were getting back into their vehicles when everyone heard the shot. It was a single loud crack.

No one was precisely sure where it had come from. Everyone knew precisely where it hit. It struck a marine who was peering out of the first vehicle’s gun turret. He collapsed.

Petty Officer Kirby rushed to him and found him breathing. He bandaged the marine’s head as the vehicle lurched away. Soon he helped load the wounded marine into a helicopter, which touched down beside the convoy within 12 minutes of the shot.

Once the helicopter lifted away, he ran back to his vehicle, ready to treat anyone else. He was thinking about the marine he had already treated.

“If I had gone with him,” he said, and glanced to where the helicopter had flown away, over the line of date palms at the end of a field. His voice softened. “But I’m not with him,” he said.

He turned, faced a reporter and spoke loudly again. “In situations and times like this, I am bound to start yelling and shouting furiously,” he said. “Don’t think I am losing my mind.”

He held his bloody hands before his face, to examine them. They were shaking. He made fists so tight his veins bulged. His forearms started to bounce.

“His name was Lance Cpl. Colin Smith,” he said. “He said a prayer today right before we came out, too.”

“Every time before we go out, we say a prayer,” he said. “It is a prayer for serenity. It says a lot about things that do pertain to us in this kind of environment.”

The only sounds were Doc’s voice and the vehicle’s engine thrumming.

He recited the prayer. There was a few moments of silence. “It’s a platoon kind of thing, if you know what I mean,” he said.

He listened to his radio headset and looked at Lance Corporal Tafoya, relaying word of the marines’ movements. “Right now the grunts are performing a hard hit on a house,” he said. He turned back to the subject of Lance Corporal Smith, 19.

“The best news I can throw at anybody right now, and that I am throwing to myself as often as I can, is that his eyes were O.K.,” he said. “They were both responsive. And he was breathing. And he had a pulse.”

He listened to his radio. “Two houses they’ve hit so far have both been swept and cleared.”

He looked at the reporter beside him. “Do you pray?” he asked. “Do that. I’d appreciate it.”

After a few minutes he started talking again. “You see, having a good platoon, one that you know real well, it’s both a gift and a curse. And Smith? Smith has been with me since I was...”

He stopped. “He was my roommate before we left,” he said.

He refilled his lungs and raised his voice. “His dad was his best friend,” he said. “He’s got the cutest little blond girlfriend, and she freaks out every time we call because she’s so happy to hear from him.”

Before the attack, the marines were searching for weapons in houses in Karma, Anbar Province.
He sat quietly again. A few minutes passed. “The first casualty we had here — his name was James Hirlston — he was his good friend.”

“Hirlston got shot in the head, too,” he said.

He said something about Iraqi snipers that could not be printed here.

Then he was back to the subject of Lance Corporal Smith.

“I really thank God that he was breathing when I got to him, because it means that I can do something with him,” he said. “It helps. People ask you, ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ It helps, because if he’s breathing, you’re doing something.”

There had been many Iraqi civilians outside a few minutes before the sniper made his shot. Most of them had disappeared. Now an Iraqi woman walked calmly between the sniper and the marines, as if nothing had happened.

She passed down the street.

Petty Officer Kirby began to list the schools he had attended to be ready for this moment. Some he had paid for himself, he said, to be extra-prepared.

In one course, an advanced trauma treatment program he had taken before deploying, he said, the instructors gave each corpsman an anesthetized pig.

“The idea is to work with live tissue,” he said. “You get a pig and you keep it alive. And every time I did something to help him, they would wound him again. So you see what shock does, and what happens when more wounds are received by a wounded creature.”

“My pig?” he said. “They shot him twice in the face with a 9-millimeter pistol, and then six times with an AK-47 and then twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. And then he was set on fire.”

“I kept him alive for 15 hours,” he said. “That was my pig.”

“That was my pig,” he said.

He paused. “Smith is my friend.”

He looked at his bloody hands. “You got some water?” he said. “I want some water. I just want to wash my wedding band.”

He listened to the tactical radio. The platoon was sweeping houses but could not find the sniper.

The company started to move. It stopped at another house. The marines were questioning five Iraqi men. Doc watched from the road, waiting for the next call.

“I would like to say that I am a good man,” he said. “But seeing this now, what happened to Smith, I want to hurt people. You know what I mean?”

The marines had not fired a shot.

They took one of the men into custody, mounted their vehicles and drove back to Outpost Omar, their company base, passing knots of Iraqi civilians on the way. The civilians looked at them coldly.

Inside the wire, First Lt. Scott R. Burlison, the company commander, gathered the group and told them that Lance Corporal Smith was alive and in surgery. He was critical, but stable. They hoped to fly him to Germany.

Doc had scrubbed himself clean. A big marine stepped forward with a small Bible, and the platoon huddled. He began with Psalm 91, verses 5 and 11.

“Thou shall not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day,” said the big marine, Lance Cpl. Daniel B. Nicholson. “For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.”

Then he asked for the Lord to look after Lance Corporal Smith and whatever was ahead, and to take care of everyone who was still in the platoon.

“Help us Lord,” he said. “We need your help. It’s the only way we’re going to get through this.”

Doc stood in the corner, his arm looped over a marine. “Amen,” he said. There were some hugs, and then the marines and their Doc went back to their bunks and their guns.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wo...nov02,1,2904627.

THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ: HOMESICK TROOPS AND BAGHDAD KIDNAPPINGS
Homeward bound -- if only for a year
Soldiers in one U.S. battalion in Iraq prepare to see their families. But they know another tour is likely.
By Borzou Daragahi, Times Staff Writer
November 2, 2006

camp paliwoda, iraq — Home means snowboarding, family meals and first-run movies. Home is where you can sleep late and drive around town in a pickup with the windows down and the radio up.

"I want to relax, maybe dress down, put on shorts and a T-shirt instead of wearing a uniform, maybe every once in a while not shave," Sgt. Jon Bullard said as he prepared to pack up his gear and head home to his wife and 12-year-old daughter.

Bullard and the other soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, or the 1-8, are finishing up a one-year tour of duty in Iraq, leaving the portable toilets and processed food of this bleak base 50 miles north of Baghdad for division headquarters in Ft. Carson, Colo.

But home may be a fleeting respite. This was the battalion's second tour in Iraq, and most think they will be back for a third time, probably in another year.

"I hate this place," said Spc. Alex Esteban, a 21-year-old Miami native who mapped out plans for a trip to Las Vegas. At home, "I won't worry about getting shot at or mortared. But there's a 90% chance that I'll be back here in a year. I have no choice. It's my job."

Outside the former schoolhouse used as a battalion headquarters, the soldiers waited for the Chinook helicopters that would ferry them to nearby Anaconda, the massive air base where they would stay for a few days before heading to Kuwait and beyond.

Delay followed delay. They laid their rucksacks and M-16s on the ground; some dozed beneath the stars daydreaming, smoking cigarettes and chewing tobacco.

The talk turned to politics.

"There is no progress," said Sgt. Stephen Brodbeck, a 25-year-old Denver native. "We've been here doing the same thing for 3 1/2 years. These are the same Iraqi soldiers we tried to train in 2003. We did a lot, but it was all in vain. And the guys we lost, we lost in vain."

Others chimed in, some vehemently disagreeing.

"We're helping provide security and buy time for the Iraqi government to step in," said Capt. Andrew Kletzing, 25, of Chicago. "Every month that goes by, they get a little bit more credibility and a little stronger. In the grand scheme of things it's making a difference. If we can succeed here, we can change the course of history."

Still, many of the soldiers despair at how bad things have gotten since they were last here.

"This doesn't look good, the things here," said Sgt. Dominie Price, 25, of Wheaton, Ill. "Maybe we don't see the big picture, and things will be better the next time we come back."

Almost all have become news junkies in Iraq, hanging on every word spoken by U.S. officials about the war, reading newspapers and news websites for clues about the country's security situation, any deployment extensions and whether the war will continue for many months or many years.

A sobering toll

It's been a harsh year for the men and women of the 1-8, a unit of the 3rd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, and the rest of the troops in Iraq. At least 780 troops have died in the country since the 4th Infantry deployed here last November, 105 in the last month alone. At least 5,500 troops have been wounded in the last year.

Five guys from the 1-8 won't be making it back to Ft. Carson. Their comrades recall their names as they were read out during commemorative roll calls:

Staff Sgt. Curtis T. Howard II, 32, of Ann Arbor, Mich.

Sgt. Gordon F. Misner II, 23, of Sparks, Nev.

Sgt. Dimitri Muscat, 21, of Aurora, Colo.

Spc. Thomas J. Wilwerth, 21, of Mastic, N.Y.

Spc. Walter B. Howard II, 35, of Rochester, Mich.

The soldiers cherish memories of home to keep up morale. Back home, though, life has not stopped. Relationships with loved ones have become more strained. Children have grown a year older.

"I'm worried about my son not recognizing me," said Spc. Joseph D. Leon, 23, of Santa Paula. "It's been hard just with the kids being so young still and just trying to get them going, and my wife being home by herself taking care of everything."

First thing he'll do when he gets home is take his wife, son and daughter to the zoo. "My daughter loves the monkeys running around, and the birds," he said.

Capt. Mark T. Jenner's mother died of cancer while he was deployed in Iraq. He's planning to leave the military. The 26-year-old Cherry Hill, N.J., native is looking forward to spending Thanksgiving with his wife and piecing together a new life as a civilian.

"We're into wine," he said. "We had a little hobby of traveling around the Colorado countryside and visiting the vineyards."

A light rain began, among the first signs of the coming winter. The noontime call to prayers floated across from a nearby mosque as Capt. Keith L. Carter, the departing commander of Bravo Company, set out on what was likely to be his last visit to Balad, a friendly, ramshackle Shiite Muslim farming town that has been the focus of the troops' attention.

Carter has put on 15 pounds since taking up weight lifting in Iraq. He used to run five or more miles a day. Being here, he says, has changed his physique.

"Since being in Iraq, I can bench press way more than I used to," he said.

But like many officers here, the low-key 29-year-old Chelmsford, Mass., native wonders whether any of his efforts to train Iraqi forces and improve security have made a difference.

"I think we're winning," he said. "But the pace isn't as rapid as a lot of people would like."

Confrontation in Balad

A commotion erupted in downtown Balad as the convoy pulled in. Residents gathered near the police headquarters. Carter led a group of men inside. The police chief and mayor were triumphant, showing off a pair of bloodied suspected insurgents they had captured.

A group of Iraqi soldiers and police manning a volatile checkpoint had confronted a car carrying three suspected insurgents. They engaged in a gun battle, killing one man who turned out to be a member of a local security force and arresting the two others, who had dynamite and other munitions in their Toyota sedan.

The suspected insurgents had a map of Balad that obviously came from Americans, giving credence to long-held suspicions that the security force in question, the Iraqi Strategic Infrastructure Battalion, had been infiltrated by insurgents.

"Did the terrorists have this map on them?" Carter asked.

Yes, they replied.

"Good job," he told them.

The rain clouds dispersed as the patrol pushed through traffic toward the base. Beams of sunlight illuminated the green farmlands.

"They did this by themselves," Carter said. "We didn't even know about it."

Later that night at the base, the next batch of soldiers scheduled to head home started to assemble near headquarters. They clutched their redeployment orders as they waited for roll call. They eventually dozed off, but sprung to life as the roar of the Chinooks began to fill the sky over Iraq.


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daragahi@latimes.com

CHILD VICTIMS OF IRAQ'S WAR TROUBLE U.S. MEDICS - (REUTERS, OCTOBER 31)
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L31279330.htm

NEARLY 50,000 AMERICAN CASUALTIES: THE US BODY COUNT IN IRAQ: AN ANALYSIS OF WHO IS DYING AND HOW - WINSLOW T. WHEELER (COUNTERPUNCH, NOVEMBER 2)
http://www.counterpunch.org/wheeler11022006.html

CUMULATIVE NUMBER OF DEATHS OF US TROOPS - (FINANCIAL TIMES, OCTOBER 29)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/c82dc1a8-68f0-11db...00779e2340.html

U.S. MILITARY ADOPTS DESPERATE TACTICS - DAHR JAMAIL AND ALI AL-FADHILY, (ELECTRONIC IRAQ, NOVEMBER 1)
http://electroniciraq.net/news/printer2584.shtml

US MILITARY SEES IRAQ EDGING TOWARD CHAOS -- REPORT - (REUTERS, NOVEMBER 1)
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N01350048.htm

US EFFORTS IN IRAQ EMBATTLED, BUT OFTEN WELCOMED - SCOTT PETERSON (CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NOVEMBER 3)
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1103/p01s03-woiq.html

GENERAL PLAYS DOWN DISCORD BETWEEN U.S. AND IRAQIS - KIRK SEMPLE (NEW YORK TIMES, NOVEMBER 3)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/world/mi...agewanted=print

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate...&entry_id=10582