War sucks, Man sucks.
Everyone must defend theirselves. The US may do somethings wrong, but NO ONE has the right to attack or harm us.
If that was true we would be killing eachother
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 10:46 pm Posts: 9617 Location: Medford, Oregon Gender: Male
Losing hearts and minds
By Derrick Z. Jackson | May 13, 2005
WHEN THE Abu Ghraib prison scandal exploded a year ago, President Bush said it was ''an insult to the Iraqi people and an affront to the most basic standards of morality and decency." He said, ''These humiliating acts do not reflect our character." He also said, ''American soldiers and civilians on the ground have come to know and respect the citizens of Iraq."
Less than a week before the scandal became worldwide news, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that all was relatively well between Iraqi civilians and American occupiers.
''I don't think that we have lost their hearts and minds," Powell said. ''I think most of the Iraqi people know what we are doing and want to be part of that. . . . What we don't have are the hearts and minds of the thugs, the former regime elements, and the terrorists who have come to make trouble. . . . The Iraqi people, whose hearts and minds we have, will see that these thugs and criminals are attacking the government of the Iraqi people."
On Wednesday, National Public Radio broadcast a piece that made it appallingly clear that we have not cleaned up our character in Iraq. Humiliation remains a primary weapon. For all the soldiers who have a heart, a lot also appear to have lost their minds.
NPR reporter Philip Reeves followed American soldiers around Mosul. At one point, the soldiers decided to take over a civilian house for two hours as a surveillance post. A lieutenant said to the surprised family of the house, ''Listen to me. Let me make this really clear for you. We need to be in your house for two hours. Everybody in this house will stay here."
When the family continue to appear to be ''baffled and unhappy," another soldier stepped in and said (with obscenities bleeped out by NPR):
''Look, check this out. You tell them this. You're not [bleep] leaving. Nobody's [bleep] leaving this house. You're not using the phone. Anybody comes, they're going to [bleep] stay here. OK? You give me a [bleep] hard time, I'll turn you [bleep] guys into the commandos, and they'll [bleep] you up."
In the background, one soldier said, ''Hey don't translate that." Another soldier added, ''Yeah, don't say that." The soldier with the foul mouth said, ''That's what I tell them all the time." Again, a soldier said, ''You shouldn't say that."
Bush has boasted how ''Iraqis have laid the foundations of a free society, with hundreds of independent newspapers." The reality was a bit more totalitarian. The featured soldiers handed out a newspaper full of favorable news about the US-installed government. When they saw that two young Iraqis had ripped up the newspaper, a soldier took one aside and asked, ''Why are you ripping up the paper? Why are you ripping up the paper?"
A staff sergeant told NPR, ''When a guy tears up a paper in my face, it looks like he's disrespecting everything we're trying to do. Maybe he knows somebody. Or maybe he is somebody. But it's just blatant for him to tear it up in my face and then lie about it. It's blatant. He blatantly disrespected everything that we're trying to accomplish."
Finally a supervising soldier, playing the benevolent occupier, told the young Iraqi, ''If you tore up the paper, that's fine. If you didn't tear up the paper, that's fine. Don't tear up the papers in the future, OK?"
This is not to tear up the soldiers. They are but pawns of President Bush, who declared major combat operations over under the banner of ''Mission Accomplished" two years ago. If all that soldiers can now accomplish is curse at baffled Iraqi families and berate people in the streets for exercising what we consider the right of free speech to tear up a newspaper, then there is no mission.
In a sign of their morass, the soldiers described themselves in lowly terms far removed from the pre-invasion build-up, when Vice President Dick Cheney said ''we will be greeted as liberators." The supervising soldier in Mosul told NPR as his armored vehicle cruised the streets, ''If you look on the walls here, you can see all this graffiti. We've really taken to the streets here kind of like a gang unit would in, say, LA. It's a giant gang war, and we've got the biggest gang, so every time we see graffiti, we mark it out, we tag it with 'US Forces,' and we say, 'Hey look, this is our block.' "
Funny, when Bush told us we were liberating the Iraqi people, he said nothing about employing the Crips and Bloods.
Bush: Iraq war plans memo wrong Tuesday, June 7, 2005 Posted: 9:03 PM EDT (0103 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President George W. Bush said Tuesday that there was "nothing farther from the truth" than allegations in a British government memorandum that his administration had decided to go to war in Iraq months before he took his case to the American people.
The British document -- known as the Downing Street memo since its publication in a British newspaper --says the Bush administration considered an invasion of Iraq to be "inevitable" as early as July 2002 and that "the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy."
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who met Tuesday with Bush at the White House, told reporters, "The facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all." Both leaders said they viewed military action as a last resort.
"Somebody said, well, you know, we had made up our mind to use military force to deal with Saddam. There's nothing farther from the truth," Bush said.
A U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and led to an ongoing conflict that, so far, has killed nearly 1,700 U.S. troops and 89 British troops.
Bush and Blair said the invasion was needed because Saddam was maintaining clandestine stockpiles of nerve gas, biological weapons and secret nuclear weapons and missile programs, but no such weapons turned up after the invasion.
The case for war
Bush administration officials began building the case for war in the late summer of 2002, warning Americans that Iraq was defying international sanctions mandating its disarmament.
In September 2002, Bush urged the United Nations to demand Iraq allow weapons inspectors back in.
A month later, Bush warned that the United States could not wait for "the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." And in the same month, the U.S. Congress gave him the authority to launch military action against Iraq -- authority he used in March 2003.
The Downing Street memo quotes the head of British intelligence, identified as "C," as saying in July 2002 that Bush "wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy."
It states the U.S. National Security Council had "no patience" for going to the United Nations, but described the case for war as "thin." It also questioned whether the invasion would be legal under international law.
British officials have not disputed the authenticity of the document, first published last month by the Times of London.
Blair said Tuesday the memo was written "before we then went to the United Nations" to demand Iraq demonstrate that it had complied with U.N. resolutions mandating its disarmament.
"No one knows more intimately the discussions that we were conducting as two countries at the time than me," he said.
"And the fact is, we decided to go to the United Nations and went through that process, which resulted in the November 2002 United Nations resolution to give a final chance to Saddam Hussein to comply with international law. He didn't do so, and that was the reason why we had to take military action."
After the minutes of the British meeting became public, 89 Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to Bush asking for an explanation. Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has said the White House has not answered the letter.
U.N. weapons inspectors were allowed back into Iraq in November 2002 and stayed in the country until March 17, 2003, when Bush issued an ultimatum to Saddam to leave power within 48 hours or face war.
U.S.-led inspectors later confirmed that Iraq had dismantled its weapons programs, though it had concealed some weapons-related research from the United Nations.
Tuesday, both leaders said the invasion was necessary because Saddam had flouted U.N. sanctions requiring his government to give up its weapons programs.
"The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power," Bush said.
Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 7:23 am Posts: 1041 Location: Anchorage, Alaska Gender: Male
Voodoo Child10 wrote:
War sucks, Man sucks. Everyone must defend theirselves. The US may do somethings wrong, but NO ONE has the right to attack or harm us. If that was true we would be killing eachother
Who attacked us? Iraq?
Athletic Supporter wrote:
A close friend of mine will be leaving for Iraq in the fall. His assignment is transportation security.
The husband of one of my family's closest friends is shipping out in about a month. His mission: fly choppers around Mosul.
By Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru, Washington Post Foreign Service
Fri Jun 10, 1:00 AM ET
BAIJI, Iraq -- An hour before dawn, the sky still clouded by a dust storm, the soldiers of the Iraqi army's Charlie Company began their mission with a ballad to ousted president Saddam Hussein. "We have lived in humiliation since you left," one sang in Arabic, out of earshot of his U.S. counterparts. "We had hoped to spend our life with you."
But the Iraqi soldiers had no clue where they were going. They shrugged their shoulders when asked what they would do. The U.S. military had billed the mission as pivotal in the Iraqis' progress as a fighting force but had kept the destination and objectives secret out of fear the Iraqis would leak the information to insurgents.
"We can't tell these guys about a lot of this stuff, because we're not really sure who's good and who isn't," said Rick McGovern, a tough-talking 37-year-old platoon sergeant from Hershey, Pa., who heads the military training for Charlie Company.
The reconstruction of Iraq's security forces is the prerequisite for an American withdrawal from Iraq. But as the Bush administration extols the continuing progress of the new Iraqi army, the project in Baiji, a desolate oil town at a strategic crossroads in northern Iraq, demonstrates the immense challenges of building an army from scratch in the middle of a bloody insurgency.
Charlie Company disintegrated once after its commander was killed by a car bomb in December. And members of the unit were threatening to quit en masse this week over complaints that ranged from dismal living conditions to insurgent threats. Across a vast cultural divide, language is just one impediment. Young Iraqi soldiers, ill-equipped and drawn from a disenchanted Sunni Arab minority, say they are not even sure what they are fighting for. They complain bitterly that their American mentors don't respect them.
In fact, the Americans don't: Frustrated U.S. soldiers question the Iraqis' courage, discipline and dedication and wonder whether they will ever be able to fight on their own, much less reach the U.S. military's goal of operating independently by the fall.
"I know the party line. You know, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, five-star generals, four-star generals, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld: The Iraqis will be ready in whatever time period," said 1st Lt. Kenrick Cato, 34, of Long Island, N.Y., the executive officer of McGovern's company, who sold his share in a database firm to join the military full time after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "But from the ground, I can say with certainty they won't be ready before I leave. And I know I'll be back in Iraq, probably in three or four years. And I don't think they'll be ready then."
"We don't want to take responsibility; we don't want it," said Amar Mana, 27, an Iraqi private whose forehead was grazed by a bullet during an insurgent attack in November. "Here, no way. The way the situation is, we wouldn't be ready to take responsibility for a thousand years."
Maj. Gen. Joseph J. Taluto, commander of the 42nd Infantry Division, which oversees an area of north-central Iraq that includes Baiji and is the size of West Virginia, called the Iraqi forces "improved and improving." He acknowledged that the Iraqis suffered from a lack of equipment and manpower but predicted that, at least in his area of operation, the U.S. military would meet its goal of having battalion-level units operating independently by the fall.
"I can tell you, making assessments, I think we're on target," he said in an interview.
U.S. officers said the Iraqis had been particularly instrumental in obtaining intelligence that led to the detention of several suspected insurgent leaders in the region. They said it was unfair to evaluate the Iraqi forces by U.S. standards.
"We're not trying to make the 82nd Airborne here," Taluto said.
Overall, the number of Iraqi military and police trained and equipped is more than 169,000, according to the U.S. military, which has also said there are 107 operational military and special police battalions. As of last month, however, U.S. and Iraqi commanders had rated only three battalions capable of operating independently.
Two Washington Post reporters spent three days traveling with the Americans and the Iraqis, respectively. The unit was selected by the U.S. military. The journey revealed fundamental, perhaps irreconcilable differences over everything from the reluctance of Muslim soldiers to search mosques and homes to basic questions of lifestyle. Earlier this year, for instance, the Americans imported Western-style portable toilets that the Iraqis, accustomed to another style, found objectionable. In an attempt to bridge the difference, the U.S. military installed diagrams depicting proper use of the "port-a-johns."
The differences clash across a landscape that has grown increasingly violent since Iraq's Jan. 30 parliamentary elections, when U.S. commanders made the training of the Iraqi forces their top priority. In Taluto's region, insurgents set off five car bombs in February; there were 35 in May. Over that period, 1,150 roadside bombs were planted, according to division statistics.
Last week, U.S soldiers from 1st Platoon, Alpha Company, and Iraqis from 2nd Platoon, Charlie Company, clambered into their vehicles to patrol the streets of Baiji. The Americans drove fully enclosed armored Humvees, the Iraqis open-backed Humvees with benches, the sides of which were protected by plating the equivalent of a flak jacket. The Americans were part of 1st Battalion, 103rd Armor Regiment of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.
As an American reporter climbed in with the Iraqis, the U.S. soldiers watched in bemused horror.
"You might be riding home alone," one soldier said to the other reporter.
"Is he riding in the back of that?" asked another. "I'll be over here praying."
The Iraqi soldiers were a grim lot, patrolling streets where they lived and mosques where they worshiped. As they entered their neighborhoods, some of them donned black balaclavas and green scarves to mask their identities. They passed graffiti on walls that, like the town, were colored in shades of brown. "Yes to the leader Saddam," one slogan read. "Long live the mujaheddin," said another. Nearly all the men had received leaflets warning them to quit; the houses of several had been attacked by insurgents.
"Don't you dare move!" shouted Cpl. Ahmed Zwayid, 26, pointing his gun at an approaching car.
The men spoke of the insurgents with a hint of awe, saying the fighters were willing to die and outgunned them with rocket-propelled grenades and, more fearsome, car bombs. Zwayid, a father of three, looked in disgust at his own AK-47 assault rifle, with a green shoelace for a strap.
"We fire 10 bullets and it falls apart," he said. Zwayid patted a heavy machine gun mounted in the bed of the Humvee. "This jams," he said. "Are these the weapons worthy of a soldier?" He and others said it was a sign of the Americans' lack of confidence in them.
"We trust the Americans. We go everywhere with them, we do what they ask," he said. "But they don't trust us."
Up ahead, McGovern conducted his own tour of Baiji's panorama of violence. He pointed out "dead man's grove," a stand of trees the Americans recently bulldozed because it was used to conceal bombs, and "dead man's road," a dangerous stretch of highway. A nearby lot was strewn with jagged pieces of car bomb.
"Honestly, I don't think people in America understand how touchy the situation really is right now," McGovern said. "We have the military power, the military might, but we're handling everything with kid gloves because we're hoping the Iraqis are going to step up and start taking things on themselves. But they don't have a clue how to do it."
Asked when he thought the Iraqi soldiers might be ready to operate independently, McGovern said: "Honestly, there's part of me that says never. There's some cultural issues that I don't think they'll ever get through."
McGovern added that the Iraqis had "come a long way in a very short period of time" and predicted they would ultimately succeed. But he said the effort was still in its infancy.
"We like to refer to the Iraqi army as preschoolers with guns," he said.
An hour later, the men returned to Forward Operating Base Summerall, a sandy expanse behind concrete barricades and concertina wire a few miles outside town. They followed U.S. military protocol: Each soldier dismounted from the vehicle and cleared his weapon. Zwayid stayed in the truck, handed his gun to a friend and asked him to clear it.
"Get down and clear your own weapon!" Cpl. William Kozlowski shouted to Zwayid in English.
Zwayid answered in Arabic. "That's my weapon," he explained, pointing to his friend.
"Corporal, you're a leader!" Kozlowski shouted back. "Take charge!"
Zwayid smiled at him. "What's he saying to me?" he whispered.
Charlie Company collapsed at 9:15 a.m. on Dec. 5. A gray Chevrolet Caprice packed with explosives detonated among a crowd of Iraqi soldiers during a shift change. Among the five dead was Capt. Mohammed Jassim Rumayidh, the company commander. His death prompted all but 30 of the company's 250 soldiers to quit; many took their weapons with them.
The bombing coincided with the arrival of a battalion of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. The unit began rebuilding the Iraqi company from scratch. The Americans initially sent a small group of soldiers to work with the Iraqis. That changed after the Jan. 30 elections. Cato said the unit received a flurry of orders from commanders to make the training of Iraqi security forces "our main effort."
The battalion dispatched McGovern's platoon, about 35 soldiers, to work exclusively with the Iraqis. But the effort was immediately beset by problems. Due to a mixup in paperwork, dozens of Iraqi soldiers went without pay for three months. Many lacked proper uniforms, body armor and weapons. To meet the shortfall, U.S. forces gave the Iraqis rifles and ammunition confiscated during raids in Baiji. Of six interpreters assigned to the company, two quit and two others said they were preparing to.
"They've come a long way in a short period of time," Cato, the Alpha Company executive officer, said of the Iraqi soldiers. "When we first got here, soldiers were going to sleep on the objective. Soldiers were selling their weapons when they went out on patrol. I was on missions when soldiers would get tired, and they would just start dragging their weapons or using them as walking sticks."
The men are housed at what they call simply "the base," a place as sparse as the name. Most of the Iraqis sleep in two tents and a shed with a concrete floor and corrugated tin roof that is bereft of walls. Some have cots; others sleep on cardboard or pieces of plywood stacked with tattered and torn blankets. The air conditioners are broken. There is no electricity.
Drinking water comes from a sun-soaked camouflage tanker whose meager faucet also provides water for bathing.
"This is the shower of the National Guard, Baiji Division," said Tala Izba, 23, a corporal, as others laughed.
"Mines, car bombs and our duties, and then we have to come back to this?" said another soldier, Kamil Khalaf.
Pvt. Aziz Nawaf, 23, shook his head. "At night, I'm so hot I feel like my skin is going to peel off," he said.
Almost to a man, the soldiers said they joined for the money -- a relatively munificent $300 to $400 a month. The military and police forces offered some of the few job opportunities in town. Even then, the soldiers were irate: They wanted more time off, air-conditioned quarters like their American counterparts and, most important, respect. Most frustrating, they said, was the two- or three-hour wait to be searched at the base's gate when they returned from leave.
The soldiers said 17 colleagues had quit in the past few days.
"In 15 days, we're all going to leave," Nawaf declared.
The two-dozen soldiers gathered nodded their heads.
"All of us," Khalaf said. "We'll live by God, but we'll have our respect."
But the Americans said the Iraqis hadn't earned respect. "As Arab men, they want for us to think that they're just the same as us as soldiers, that they're just as brave," Cato said. "But they show cowardice. They'll say to me, 'I wasn't afraid.' But if you're running, then you were obviously not just afraid, you were running away."
Last month, three trucks filled with two dozen soldiers from Charlie Company were ambushed near a Tigris River bridge. Instead of meeting the attack, the Iraqis fled and radioed for help. The Americans said the Iraqis told them they had lost 20 men, had run out of ammunition and were completely surrounded.
When a U.S. quick reaction force arrived, the area was quiet and the Iraqi soldiers were huddled around their trucks. Four were missing; it was later learned that they had hailed taxis, gone home and changed into civilian clothes. One soldier, the company's senior noncommissioned officer, refused to come out for several hours, saying he continued to be surrounded by insurgents.
After the incident, McGovern said he summoned an interpreter, asked him to translate the soldier's words verbatim and "disgraced" the Iraqi soldiers.
"You are all cowards," he began. "My soldiers are over here, away from our families for a year. We are willing to die for you to have freedom. You should be willing to die for your own freedom. If you continue to run away from the enemy, the enemy will continue to chase you. You will never win."
McGovern asked the interpreter, Nabras Mohammed, if he had gone too far.
"Well, you shouldn't have called them women, and you shouldn't have called them" wimps, Mohammed told him.
"Of course they were scared," said Cpl. Idris Dhanoun, 30, a native of Baiji with two years in the security forces, who defended his colleagues. "The majority of them haven't seen fighting, they haven't seen war, they haven't been soldiers. The terrorists want to die. A hundred percent, they want to die. It's jihad. They want to kill themselves in the path of God."
Shortly after the ambush, a sniper shot a U.S. soldier standing on the roof of a police station, inflicting a severe head wound. The Americans suspected that the fire had come from the nearby Rahma mosque. American and Iraqi troops surrounded the building. Fearful of inflaming resentment, U.S. soldiers ordered their Iraqi counterparts to search the mosque. They initially refused, entering only after McGovern berated them.
"But I don't know if they searched it that well. They were still tip-toeing when they were in there," said Sgt. Cary Conner, 25, of Newport News, Va., who was among the first soldiers on the scene.
U.S. forces then ordered the Iraqis to arrest everyone inside the mosque, including the respected elderly prayer leader. The Iraqi platoon leader refused, U.S. soldiers recalled. The platoon leader and his men then sat down next to the mosque in protest.
"We wanted to tell the Americans they couldn't do this again," Dhanoun said.
In a measure of the shame they felt, the men insisted they had not entered the mosque.
"You can't enter the mosque with weapons. We have traditions, we have honor, and we're Muslims," Dhanoun said. "You enter the mosque to pray, you don't enter the mosque with guns."
At 4:30 a.m. Monday, the men of Charlie Company and the entire U.S. battalion -- some 800 soldiers -- set out in a convoy for west Baiji. The Americans used night-vision goggles to see in the dark. The Iraqis had glow sticks. Before the troops had left the base, an Iraqi driver plowed into a concrete barrier, momentarily delaying the convoy.
U.S. commanders said the involvement of the Iraqis on the mission -- a series of raids to crack a bomb-making cell -- was critical to its success. But the Americans clearly have lowered their expectations for the Iraqis' progress.
"Things are going to change according to their schedule, not our politics back home," said Sgt. Jonathan Flynn, 36, of Star Lake, N.Y. "You can't just put an artificial timetable on that."
Along dirt roads bisected by sewage canals, the men of Charlie Company crouched, their weapons ready. Before them was their home town, dilapidated and neglected. Cpl. Amir Omar, 19, gazed ahead.
"Look at the homes of the Iraqis," he said, a handkerchief concealing his face. "The people have been destroyed."
By whom? he was asked.
"Them," Omar said, pointing at the U.S. Humvees leading the patrol.
_________________ Deep below the dunes I roved Past the rows, past the rows Beside the acacias freshly in bloom I sent men to their doom
Published on Friday, June 10, 2005 by Knight-Ridder
More Americans Dying from Roadside Bombs in Iraq by Mark Washburn
CAMP ANACONDA, Iraq - Improvised explosive devices, the roadside bombs that insurgents build from castoff artillery shells and other munitions, have become the No. 1 killer of American troops in Iraq this year, despite a massive U.S. campaign to blunt their effectiveness.
American commanders have dispatched newly armored Humvees, Army engineers have begun a yearlong program to clear vegetation and debris along major transportation routes, and military technicians have equipped vehicles with devices that jam cell phones and garage-door openers, which are used to trigger the explosives.
The rising number of deaths due to IEDs suggests that insurgents have been able to counter American measures with bigger and better bombs.
In spite of those efforts, deaths due to IEDs rose by more than 41 percent in the first five months of this year, compared with the same period last year, and account for nearly 51 percent of the 255 U.S. combat deaths so far this year, according to statistics assembled by Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, an Internet site that assembles statistics based on official U.S. casualty reports.
That's a change from 2004, when IEDs accounted for 189 of the 720 combat deaths among U.S. troops - about 26 percent.
In the first five months of last year, 85 deaths were attributed to IEDs. In the same period this year, 120 deaths were due to roadside bombs. They were the No. 1 cause of U.S. combat deaths for each of the five full months so far this year.
IEDs have killed 10 American service members so far in June; last year, they caused only one U.S. death in the first week of June.
Pentagon officials acknowledge that insurgents are killing more American troops with bigger bombs and say soldiers headed to Iraq or Afghanistan get specific training to help them recognize and survive IEDs.
Military officers in Iraq are optimistic that the U.S. efforts to counter IEDs will work. Brig. Gen. Tom Lawing, who oversees Army engineers working throughout northern Iraq, said military patrols were uncovering half of the roadside IEDS before they could be detonated.
Recent sweeps to round up suspected insurgents also have helped, Brig. Gen. Yves Fontaine said.
"We are pursuing an aggressive attack against the insurgents. They don't have time for IEDs because they are running," said Fontaine, of 1st Corp Support Command, which oversees Camp Anaconda, 60 miles north of Baghdad, the nucleus for logistical support and supply throughout Iraq.
But the rising number of deaths due to IEDs suggests that insurgents have been able to counter American measures with bigger and better bombs.
One U.S. military official in Washington, who declined to be named because the information he was revealing was classified, said insurgents had learned to make a more advanced type of IED called a shaped-charge, which is designed to penetrate armor.
Roadside bombs were first used against coalition military convoys in July 2003. The numbers grew steadily as insurgents exploited the vulnerability of American supply lines and a hefty supply of munitions that Saddam Hussein's army had abandoned and U.S. troops left unguarded for months after Saddam's regime fell.
The bombs became the focus of attention last December, when a Tennessee National Guardsman in Kuwait publicly complained to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that he and others had been forced to scrounge for metal to armor the Humvees and other vehicles they had been issued to drive supplies into Iraq.
Since then, the Pentagon has shipped hundreds of armored Humvees to Iraq, added armor to those in the field and ordered unarmored vehicles to remain on protected bases.
Only 200 armored Humvees, mostly assigned to military police units, were in Iraq when insurgent violence began to rise in summer 2003. Now, about 9,000 of the 12,000 Humvees in Iraq have been armored. They're the workhorse vehicles for protecting the convoys that supply 140,000 troops across Iraq.
The insurgents have responded by creating bigger IEDs, often using 155 mm artillery shells linked in a series, which inflict multiple casualties even on hardened vehicles.
An explosion Jan. 5, for example, was so powerful that it ripped through an armored Bradley Fighting Vehicle in Baghdad, killing seven Army National Guardsmen from the 256th Infantry Brigade, based in Lafayette, La. On May 23, in Haswa, a single blast killed four Army National Guardsmen from the 155th Infantry, based in Biloxi, Miss.
Defending convoys is a massive problem. Each day, goods move to the troops in hundreds of convoys, which are on the roads day and night. Up to 4,000 trucks and tankers are used to supply the coalition's daily needs, which range from a million gallons of fuel to more than 100,000 cases of bottled water.
Commanders in Iraq have undertaken a number of initiatives aimed at cutting IED casualties. Patrols often use an armored machine called a Buffalo, which has a bomb-handling arm on its snout, to remove suspicious objects from the roadway.
Army engineers also are clearing debris, tearing out guardrails and hardening roadside shoulders along the main supply route called Tampa, a series of highways that stretch more than 500 miles from the Kuwaiti border in the south to northern Iraq.
Commanders say the project to improve security along Tampa will take a year, and they hope it'll make it harder for insurgents to plant IEDs.
Aircraft patrol key highways each day, looking for disturbances in the ground where bombs may have been hidden and other suspicious signs.
Army technicians have been equipping Humvees with Warlock jamming devices, intended to prevent insurgents from triggering IEDs with the radio waves from cell phones and garage-door openers.
The Pentagon spent $45 million for about 1,000 Warlock jammers, manufactured by EDO Communications and Countermeasures, a Westlake Village, Calif., military-supply contractor. A new generation of jammers that blocks a broader spectrum of signals is being developed. It's expected to be deployed late this year or early in 2006.
Tikrit:
A senior US military chief has admitted "good, honest" Iraqis are fighting American forces.
Major General Joseph Taluto said he could understand why some ordinary people would take up arms against the US military because "they're offended by our presence".
In an interview with Gulf News, he said: "If a good, honest person feels having all these Humvees driving on the road, having us moving people out of the way, having us patrol the streets, having car bombs going off, you can understand how they could [want to fight us]."
General Taluto, head of the US 42nd Infantry Division which covers key trouble spots, including Baquba and Samarra, also said some Iraqis not involved in fighting did support insurgents who avoided hurting civilians.
He said: "There is a sense of a good resistance, or an accepted resistance. They say 'okay, if you shoot a coalition soldier, that's okay, it's not a bad thing but you shouldn't kill other Iraqis.'"
However General Taluto insisted the US and other foreign forces would not be driven out of Iraq by violence. "If the goal is to have the coalition leave, attacking them isn't the way," he said. "The way to make it happen is to enter the political process cooperate and the coalition will be less aggressive and less visible and eventually it'll go away."
His comments come in stark contrast to the assertions of other top US figures, who persist in claiming all insurgents are either Baathists or Al Qaida terrorists.
General Taluto also admitted he did not know how many insurgents there were. "I stay away from numbers how can I quantify this? We can make estimates by doing some kind of guesswork," he said.
"I think there is a small core of foreign fighters. I don't know how big that is but there is some kind of capability here, and it's being replenished.
"Then there is a group of former regime personnel they're the facilitators. They make all the communications, move the money, they enable things to happen. Their goal isn't the same as the foreign fighters but they're using them to do what they want to do.
"Then we have the foot soldiers. Some are doing it for the money. Some are doing it because they're offended by our presence and believe we are a threat to their way of life. There are various levels."
He added: "Who knows how big these networks are, or how widespread? I know it's substantial enough to be a threat to the government and it will be for some time."
General Taluto said "99.9 per cent" of those captured fighting the US were Iraqis, but was also adamant most people in Iraq wanted a free, democratic and independent country.
He predicted attacks would continue to surge in intensity, as key milestones were reached, including the upcoming constitutional referendum.
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 7:19 pm Posts: 39068 Location: Chapel Hill, NC, USA Gender: Male
_________________ "Though some may think there should be a separation between art/music and politics, it should be reinforced that art can be a form of nonviolent protest." - e.v.
Military Action Won't End Insurgency, Growing Number of US Officers Believe
by Tom Lasseter
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A growing number of senior American military officers in Iraq have concluded that there is no long-term military solution to an insurgency that has killed thousands of Iraqis and more than 1,300 U.S. troops during the past two years.
The message is markedly different from previous statements by U.S. officials who spoke of quashing the insurgency by rounding up or killing "dead enders" loyal to former dictator Saddam Hussein. As recently as two weeks ago, in a Memorial Day interview on CNN's "Larry King Live," Vice President Dick Cheney said he believed the insurgency was in its "last throes."
Instead, officers say, the only way to end the guerilla war is through Iraqi politics - an arena that so far has been crippled by divisions between Shiite Muslims, whose coalition dominated the January elections, and Sunni Muslims, who are a minority in Iraq but form the base of support for the insurgency.
"I think the more accurate way to approach this right now is to concede that ... this insurgency is not going to be settled, the terrorists and the terrorism in Iraq is not going to be settled, through military options or military operations," Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said last week, in a comment that echoes what other senior officers say. "It's going to be settled in the political process."
Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, expressed similar sentiments, calling the military's efforts "the Pillsbury Doughboy idea" - pressing the insurgency in one area only causes it to rise elsewhere.
"Like in Baghdad," Casey said during an interview with two newspaper reporters, including one from Knight Ridder, last week. "We push in Baghdad - they're down to about less than a car bomb a day in Baghdad over the last week - but in north-center (Iraq) ... they've gone up," he said. "The political process will be the decisive element."
The recognition that a military solution is not in the offing has led U.S. and Iraqi officials to signal they are willing to negotiate with insurgent groups, or their intermediaries.
"It has evolved in the course of normal business," said a senior U.S. diplomatic official in Baghdad, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of U.S. policy to defer to the Iraqi government on Iraqi political matters. "We have now encountered people who at least claim to have some form of a relationship with the insurgency."
The message is markedly different from previous statements by U.S. officials who spoke of quashing the insurgency by rounding up or killing "dead enders" loyal to former dictator Saddam Hussein. As recently as two weeks ago, in a Memorial Day interview on CNN's "Larry King Live," Vice President Dick Cheney said he believed the insurgency was in its "last throes."
But the violence has continued unabated, even though 44 of the 55 Iraqis portrayed in the military's famous "deck of cards" have been killed or captured, including Saddam.
Lt. Col. Frederick P. Wellman, who works with the task force overseeing the training of Iraqi security troops, said the insurgency doesn't seem to be running out of new recruits, a dynamic fueled by tribal members seeking revenge for relatives killed in fighting.
"We can't kill them all," Wellman said. "When I kill one I create three."
Last month was one of the deadliest since President Bush declared the end of major combat operations in May 2003, a month that saw six American troops killed by hostile fire. In May 2005, 67 U.S. soldiers and Marines were killed by hostile fire, the fourth-highest tally since the war began, according to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, an Internet site that uses official casualty reports to organize deaths by a variety of criteria.
At least 26 troops have been killed by insurgents so far in June, bringing to 1,311 the number of U.S. soldiers killed by hostile action. Another 391 service members have died as a result of accidents or illness.
The Iraqi interior minister said last week that the insurgency has killed 12,000 Iraqis during the past two years. He did not say how he arrived at the figure.
American officials had hoped that January's national elections would blunt the insurgency by giving the population hope for their political future. But so far, the political process has not in any meaningful way included Iraq's Sunni Muslim population.
Most of Iraq's Sunnis Muslims, motivated either by fear or boycott, did not vote, and they hold a scant 17 seats in the 275-member parliament.
There was a post-election lull in bloodshed, a period that saw daily attack figures dip into the 30s. But with the seating of the interim government on April 28, attacks spiked back to 70 a day. More than 700 Iraqis have been killed since then.
The former Iraqi minister of electricity, Ayham al-Samarie, has said he's consulted with U.S. diplomatic officials about his negotiations with two major insurgent groups to form a political front of sorts. There has been similar talk in the past - notably by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's administration, which spoke of inclusion through amnesty - but nothing has come of it.
At the heart of the problem is the continued failure of U.S. and Iraqi officials to bring the nation's Sunni minority, with more than five million people, to the political table. Sunnis now find themselves in a country ruled by the Shiite and Kurdish political parties once brutally oppressed by Saddam, a Sunni.
With Shiites and Kurds stocking the nation's security forces with members of their militias, Sunnis have been marginalized and, according to some analysts in Iraq, have become more willing to join armed groups.
Since September of last year, some 85 percent of the violence in Iraq has taken place in just four of Iraq's 18 provinces: the Sunni heartland of al Anbar, Baghdad, Ninevah and Salah al Din.
U.S. officials prefer not to talk about the situation along religious lines, but they acknowledge that one of the key obstacles to resolving Iraq's problems is the difference between Sunni and Shiite religious institutions.
Shiites are organized around their marja'iya, a council of clerics - led in Iraq by Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani - that issues religious edicts that Shiite faithful follow as law. Sunnis, on the other hand, have no such unifying structure.
The difference was made clear in January when one list formed under the guidance of Sistani was the choice of almost all Shiites voting. Those Sunnis who did go to the polls split their votes among a myriad of organizations including those backed by a presumptive monarch, a group of communists and a religious group that may or may not have been boycotting the election.
Sunni Muslims near downtown Baghdad have only to drive down the street to see how precarious their position in Iraqi politics and society is these days. On roads near the party headquarters for the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is in large part shaping the policy of the nation, Kurdish militia members patrol the streets.
The troops are ostensibly part of the nation's army, but they still wear militia uniforms and, as is the case with some in Kurdistan, many either can't or won't speak Arabic. One of the roads they patrol has been named Badr Street, for the armed wing of the Supreme Council. There is a large billboard with the looming face of Abdul Aziz al Hakim, the Supreme Council's leader.
Unless Sunnis develop confidence that the government will represent them, few here see the insurgency fading.
Asked about the success in suppressing the insurgency in Baghdad recently - the result of a series of large-scale raids that in targeted primarily Sunni neighborhoods - Brig. Gen. Alston said that he expects the violence to return.
"We have taken down factories, major cells, we have made good progress in (stopping) the production of (car bombs) in Baghdad," Alston said. "Now, do I think that there will be more (bombs) in Baghdad? Yes, I do."
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 10:46 pm Posts: 9617 Location: Medford, Oregon Gender: Male
Iraq 'no more safe than in 2003'
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has acknowledged that security in Iraq has not improved statistically since Saddam Hussein's fall in 2003.
Mr Rumsfeld told the BBC insurgents crossed Iraq's "porous" borders from Iran, Syria and elsewhere.
But he said Iraq's military forces were growing in numbers and he was confident the insurgency would be defeated.
On Tuesday, at least 22 people were killed in a suicide bombing in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.
Police say most of the dead were civil servants lining up outside a government-owned bank to get their salaries or pensions.
They believe the bomber walked up to the queue with up to 30kg (66lbs) of explosives hidden under his clothes.
Among the 50 people wounded were 10 children, who had small stalls on the side of the road.
More than 900 people, mostly Iraqis, have died in insurgent attacks across the country since the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafaari took office six weeks ago.
The latest violence came as Mr Jaafari's 37-member cabinet and its programme secured a vote of confidence in the Iraqi National Assembly.
The Shia-dominated government, which was finalised on 8 May, was overwhelmingly approved by a show of hands in the 275-member transitional parliament.
Belief in the future
In an interview for the BBC's Newsnight programme, Mr Rumsfeld said Iraq had passed several milestones, like holding elections and appointing a government.
But asked if the security situation had improved, he admitted: "Statistically, no."
"But clearly it has been getting better as we've gone along," he added.
"A lot of bad things that could have happened have not happened."
He said that efforts had shifted from counter-insurgency to helping the Iraqi security forces.
"The important thing ... is to recognise that this insurgency is going to be defeated not by the coalition - it's going to be defeated by the Iraqi people and by the Iraqi security forces, and that it's going to happen as the Iraq people begin to believe they've got a future in that country," he said.
He added that Syria was not doing enough to stop the insurgency and that Iran was meddling in Iraqi politics.
Rivalry
Tuesday's explosion took place near a bridge over the road, and people were killed both on the bridge and on the ground, the Associated Press news agency reported.
At least one report says bodies are trapped under the rubble.
Kirkuk, 290km (180miles) north of Baghdad, is an ethnically mixed city wanted by the Kurds as the capital of their autonomous region in the north. It houses communities of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen vying for control.
Correspondents say the city, a major oil-producing centre, has been the focus of intense ethnic rivalry since Saddam Hussein's fall from power.
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2004 7:19 pm Posts: 39068 Location: Chapel Hill, NC, USA Gender: Male
Luke wrote:
Towelie,dont stress, progress is being made in Iraq,just remember all those massive stockpiles of WMD they found
We didn't find any WMDs.
But we did bring stability!
_________________ "Though some may think there should be a separation between art/music and politics, it should be reinforced that art can be a form of nonviolent protest." - e.v.
June 15, 2005
Let's Talk About Iraq By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Ever since Iraq's remarkable election, the country has been descending deeper and deeper into violence. But no one in Washington wants to talk about it. Conservatives don't want to talk about it because, with a few exceptions, they think their job is just to applaud whatever the Bush team does. Liberals don't want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don't want the Bush team to succeed. As a result, Iraq is drifting sideways and the whole burden is being carried by our military. The rest of the country has gone shopping, which seems to suit Karl Rove just fine.
Well, we need to talk about Iraq. This is no time to give up - this is still winnable - but it is time to ask: What is our strategy? This question is urgent because Iraq is inching toward a dangerous tipping point - the point where the key communities begin to invest more energy in preparing their own militias for a scramble for power - when everything falls apart, rather than investing their energies in making the hard compromises within and between their communities to build a unified, democratizing Iraq.
Our core problem in Iraq remains Donald Rumsfeld's disastrous decision - endorsed by President Bush - to invade Iraq on the cheap. From the day the looting started, it has been obvious that we did not have enough troops there. We have never fully controlled the terrain. Almost every problem we face in Iraq today - the rise of ethnic militias, the weakness of the economy, the shortages of gas and electricity, the kidnappings, the flight of middle-class professionals - flows from not having gone into Iraq with the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force.
Yes, yes, I know we are training Iraqi soldiers by the battalions, but I don't think this is the key. Who is training the insurgent-fascists? Nobody. And yet they are doing daily damage to U.S. and Iraqi forces. Training is overrated, in my book. Where you have motivated officers and soldiers, you have an army punching above its weight. Where you don't have motivated officers and soldiers, you have an army punching a clock.
Where do you get motivated officers and soldiers? That can come only from an Iraqi leader and government that are seen as representing all the country's main factions. So far the Iraqi political class has been a disappointment. The Kurds have been great. But the Sunni leaders have been shortsighted at best and malicious at worst, fantasizing that they are going to make a comeback to power through terror. As for the Shiites, their spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has been a positive force on the religious side, but he has no political analog. No Shiite Hamid Karzai has emerged.
"We have no galvanizing figure right now," observed Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi historian who heads the Iraq Memory Foundation. "Sistani's counterpart on the democratic front has not emerged. Certainly, the Americans made many mistakes, but at this stage less and less can be blamed on them. The burden is on Iraqis. And we still have not risen to the magnitude of the opportunity before us."
I still don't know if a self-sustaining, united and democratizing Iraq is possible. I still believe it is a vital U.S. interest to find out. But the only way to find out is to create a secure environment. It is very hard for moderate, unifying, national leaders to emerge in a cauldron of violence.
Maybe it is too late, but before we give up on Iraq, why not actually try to do it right? Double the American boots on the ground and redouble the diplomatic effort to bring in those Sunnis who want to be part of the process and fight to the death those who don't. As Stanford's Larry Diamond, author of an important new book on the Iraq war, "Squandered Victory," puts it, we need "a bold mobilizing strategy" right now. That means the new Iraqi government, the U.S. and the U.N. teaming up to widen the political arena in Iraq, energizing the constitution-writing process and developing a communications-diplomatic strategy that puts our bloodthirsty enemies on the defensive rather than us. The Bush team has been weak in all these areas. For weeks now, we haven't even had ambassadors in Iraq, Afghanistan or Jordan.
We've already paid a huge price for the Rumsfeld Doctrine - "Just enough troops to lose." Calling for more troops now, I know, is the last thing anyone wants to hear. But we are fooling ourselves to think that a decent, normal, forward-looking Iraqi politics or army is going to emerge from a totally insecure environment, where you can feel safe only with your own tribe.
_________________ Unfortunately, at the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the Flower Children jerked off and went back to sleep.
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