Shihab Almahdawi, The Human Relief Foundation
Introduction
The following speech was given in 2001, at a public meeting of the Coalition Against Sanctions and War on Iraq, the forerunner of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign UK.
We are re-publishing this article, to provide some historical insight into the disaster that was imposed upon the Iraqi people, by the United Nations sanctions.
Sanctions were first put in place after the Gulf War in 1991 and were finally lifted after the US/UK invasion in 2003. By the time sanctions were finally removed, Iraq had lost over 1.5 million children under the age of five, as a result of embargo related causes.
Shihab Almahdawi wrote “Just Come Back From Iraq” in July 2001, after a humanitarian aid mission, with the Human Relief Foundation, a registered charity that continued to provide assistance to the Iraqi people when the world turned a blind eye.
Shihab is the promotions and fundraising officer for the Human Relief Foundation, which is a registered charity and is based in Bradford, England.
"Just Come Back From Iraq"
This was our eighth visit during the last two years; the trip was to review our projects and to try and do more. We visited the 'Misan' water treatment plant, which is in the south of Iraq and is situated about 100km to the north of Al Basra City. This project is now completely finished, apart from a few cosmetics at the cost of £200,000.
Before our rehabilitation project, 50,000 households drank untreated water pumped directly from the Tigress River. Water born diseases are the main child killers around these areas. We also visited Ashama'el primary school, which we renovated at a cost of £15,000. Now the children have cold-water fountains, clean toilets, all windows are fitted with glass and curtains are a new addition.
I wrote about the state of this school in another article, which can be viewed at www.hrf.com. Lastly we visited the "Al Basra Elderly Care Center", the Human Relief Foundation added a third dormitory to house 20 new beds, showers and toilets.
We expected some change to people’s lives, to say the least, especially after ten years of sanctions. The ration has increased a bit, by Nov 2000 but still had no animal protein. For a family of six the ration contained:
4.5 kg Flour. 12.5 kg Rice. 9 pieces Soap. 3.5 kg oil (solid)
2 kg lentil or dry beans. 3 kg dry milk powder. 750 gm tea.
6 kg sugar. 500 gm salt.
Milk for so many families is an unaffordable luxury so the powder is distant to the 'Shorja Market Place' (the biggest market place in Baghdad) to be sold. Some families regard tea as a luxury and can do with out so suger will go to the market as well in exchange of a chicken or fish, although chicken is very difficult to acquire.
I took a taxi and discovered that my taxi driver was a very educated man with an undergraduate degree, MSC and was Iraq's delegate to the UNESCO. And on my way back to Amman our driver was a mechanical engineer who worked as a barber, tourist guide, tabletop seller and finally a driver.
If you were unlucky and had an accident then you would have to be extra rich to have your broken limb X-rayed and it would cost around 15,000 ID to 40,000 ID to have it plastered or to have an operation of some sort.
I met so many middle-aged men with extremely bad teeth, due to the fact that a toothbrush and paste would cost around the third of a primary school teachers salary and dental care i.e. filling, extraction, removal of plaque and the like is very expensive, hence out of the question.
Therefore people have to have two or three jobs to cope or ask openly for handouts. It is very common for a primary school teacher to ask for a financial present when your child passes his/her mid-term or final exam or if she/he were to offer to keep an extra eye on the child so that they could pass with flying colours.
Some visitors note that food and household things are on available in the market place, fruit and vegetables, meat and so on. But these people are usually bound to the main streets and never see what happens to Iraqis at the lower levels of the society. Second hand shops are on the increase and some families are still selling things to survive and send their children to the streets to provide a second income.
A happy family is the one that has a relative or a friend with a good community spirit working abroad and sending whatever he can to his relatives or friends. I was told that a paraffin seller from Al-Hardhead immigrated to the United States where he works at a super market and sends money to his family and to some of his old customers in that area. Not every family is as lucky as these but many families have relatives who work abroad. Almost 90% of Iraqi people are living in dire straits and are in urgent need of support. The rest are either having relatives abroad, businessmen who have more than two jobs or have some super-high-profit yielding enterprises.
DU related cancer and water born diseases are ruthless killers and take no prisoners. Infact erratic and irregular supply of medicine is another killer. Every family has or knows someone with cancer. This state of affairs will stay as long as the sanctions regime; smart or otherwise remains.
Driving through the streets of Baghdad is a very good thing to do; it enables you to see how the majority of Iraqi people live. Some cars go back to the early eighties; some are forty and forty five years old. Bald tires are not an issue; cars can go with no or one light at night. "One light is better than none." one driver commented and smiled, then said "Smile you are in Baghdad." I said to myself "floating on the worlds 2nd Oil reserve and can't afford to have a half decent motor."
"Look! New busses from China we have now," the taxi driver said. He added: "Do you know why we have Chinese buses and not Swedish or European for example?" I was waiting for the answer, the driver didn’t keep me in the dark for long, he said: "Because these have a short life compared to the European makes, so (Sanctions Committee) 661 approved of these together with Chinese power stations, which took two months to put in service, against the Swedish ones, in order that we loose our money and buy new stuff again."
Every person you see asks you how to get out of the country and where to go and how to get there, and you seldom visit someone and leave without being given a prescription to send the medicine to them. Young men have started taking tranquilizers and other such medication from an early age.
"Life is a misery,” a civil engineer told me. "I can't find a job, infact it is difficult to find a job these days. I am happy my brother is leaving the country". His brother is a doctor who managed through a friend oversees to arrange for him to get out the country. Another qualified person is leaving! Iraq will suffer allot because of this brain drain, infact nearly every British hospital will have an Iraqi doctor specialist in one of the unique fields of medicine and science.
When we left, we left a nation submerged in desperation, need, devastation and disease. We couldn't drink the water or eat the vegetables, only God knows what this country is drinking, eating and breathing in. In a nutshell; water, air and food are polluted and no one knows what will happen to these people in ten years time. Dr. Jenan of Al Basra Maternity Hospital had said to us "It's good that you came to see us, in ten years time we will not be around".
On leaving Iraq, our driver took us once again through the long boring journey back to Amman leaving behind us the land where the first writing scrolls were found and the first battery was made.
The cradle of civilization, what will we tell the next generation?
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Friday, October 27, 2006
An Appeal for Redress from the War in Iraq
Many active duty, reserve, and guard service members are concerned about the war in Iraq and support the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The Appeal for Redress provides a way in which individual service members can appeal to their Congressional Representative and US Senators to urge an end to the U.S. military occupation. The Appeal messages will be delivered to members of Congress at the time of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in January 2007.
The wording of the Appeal for Redress is short and simple. It is patriotic and respectful in tone.
As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq . Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.
If you agree with this message, click here.
The Appeal for Redress is sponsored by active duty service members based in the Norfolk area and by a sponsoring committee of veterans and military family members. The Sponsoring committee consists of Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans For Peace, and Military Families Speak Out.
Members of the military have a legal right to communicate with their member of Congress. To learn more about the rights and restrictions that apply to service members click here.
Attorneys and counselors experienced in military law are available to help service members who need assistance in countering any attempts to suppress this communication with members of Congress.
Several members of Congress have expressed interest in receiving the Appeal for Redress.
Click here to send the Appeal to your elected representatives.
The wording of the Appeal for Redress is short and simple. It is patriotic and respectful in tone.
As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq . Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.
If you agree with this message, click here.
The Appeal for Redress is sponsored by active duty service members based in the Norfolk area and by a sponsoring committee of veterans and military family members. The Sponsoring committee consists of Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans For Peace, and Military Families Speak Out.
Members of the military have a legal right to communicate with their member of Congress. To learn more about the rights and restrictions that apply to service members click here.
Attorneys and counselors experienced in military law are available to help service members who need assistance in countering any attempts to suppress this communication with members of Congress.
Several members of Congress have expressed interest in receiving the Appeal for Redress.
Click here to send the Appeal to your elected representatives.
Iraqi Opposition Leader Speaks
The following is the transcript of a lengthy interview, slightly edited for grammar, that I conducted by telephone with Salah Mukhtar. Mukhtar, who lives in Yemen, is a former Iraqi official and diplomat who worked in the Information Ministry and who served at the United Nations and as Iraq's ambassador to India. At the time of the invasion in 2003, he was Iraq's ambassador to Vietnam. Though he does not claim to be a spokesman for the resistance in Iraq or for the Baath party, he is close to both. Here is what he had to say:
Q. How strong is the Iraqi resistance?
A. The armed resistance has finished all the preparations to control power in Iraq. The middle class collaborators with the United States have started the leave Iraq already. Most of them are outside Iraq: Ahmed Chalabi, Iyad Allawi and others. A second wave of agents are preparing to leave, and some have already left, to Jordan, to Syria, to Britain, and some other places, because the strategic conflict, practically speaking, has reached the point of putting an end to the occupation. The resistance is controlling Baghdad now. Yesterday, I spoke to many people, and they said that the attack on the American base was part of a new strategy to inflict heavy casualties on American troops in Iraq.
Q. I’ve read that many tribal leaders in Iraq are calling for the release of Saddam Hussein, and others want to cooperate with Maliki.
A. Those who are working with Maliki are living in Jordan, not inside Iraq. They do not dare return to Iraq, especially those who are from Anbar Province, so they have no weight inside Iraq. As for those who are sending messages to release President Saddam, they constitute the overwhelming majority of the tribes in Iraq. It is becoming a national phenomenon. … It started suddenly, hundreds of messages from tribal leaders from the north to the south of Iraq.
Q. Are their pro-Baathist forces in the National Assembly?
A. They are not representing us, but they are sympathetic. They are demanding the elimination of the de-Baathification law, and to open direct dialogue with Baathists. They say that it is nonsense to talk about national reconciliation without including the Baathists in the dialogue. Even Allawi and his group were part of this.
I assure you, the resistance has the upper hand in Iraq. The only thing we are worried about is the direct intervention by Iran. Otherwise, everything is guaranteed. Within four or five hours we can impose security and stability in Iraq after the Americans withdraw. That’s why we want the UN Security Council to declare its opposition to any outside intervention in Iraq, to guarantee that Iran won’t intervene in Iraq. Otherwise, those people allied with the United States will have to leave when the United States leaves. The resistance holds the ground almost everywhere in Iraq.
Q. What is the role of Muqtada al-Sadr? Can you have a dialogue with him?
No. Muqtada is allied with Iran. … Now he is more dangerous than the Badr Brigade. The harm being inflicted on Iraqi society is from the [Sadr’s] Mahdi Army. The Badr group was crippled by the resistance.
Q. Why don’t we see a resistance movement in the Shiite areas of Iraq?
A. There are Shiites occupying high positions inside the resistance, with the Baathists. No other organization has popular support inside Iraq. But the media does not cover what is going on in the south. The nature of the operations in the south is not like the resistance operations in Anbar and Baghdad. It is directed against the so-called Hakim group [the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI] and the Mahdi Army, who are killing the nationalists, cooperating with the occupation. They are killing more people than the occupation forces are. But there is a silent majority in the south, which is against the occupation and against Iran. They are fed up with the crimes of the pro-Iranian groups.
You know, in the south, in many cities, Iran even has official offices, and the Iranian intelligence service is controlling areas of southern Iraq. They are using Iranian money. You can tell a taxi driver, “Got to the office of the Iranian intelligence service,” and they will take you. But the silent majority in the south is fed up with Iranian influence in that area. That’s why we are not concerned with the situation in the south, except for the threat of direct Iranian intervention.
The legitimate army has been rebuilt, the army that went underground in the invasion. Ands they are ready to control Iraq right now. Ninety per cent of all Iraqi resistance is made up of Iraqi army. There are highly qualified officers of the Iraqi army are leading nearly all resistance operations in Iraq.
They built the Iraqi army on a sectarian basis, with Badr Brigade and pesh merga [the Kurdish militias]. But there are some nationalists inside the army, and the resistance gets information from nationalist officers inside the official army.
Q. Will there be a Tet Offensive-type of attack? Will the Green Zone come under attack?
A. There has been talk in Baghdad about liberating the Green Zone, especially over the past few weeks. But this is not likely for the time being, because the strategy of the resistance is based on collecting points, as in boxing. You collect points, one by one, to see who is winning. So you exhaust the enemy, by attacking from time to time, until he collapses. The victory of the resistance in Iraq will not be achieved by one battle.
We expect the first month of next year will be decisive. The Americans are exhausted, and the resistance is preparing simultaneous attacks on American forces everywhere. The increase in U.S. casualties are rising sharply as part of a decision by the resistance to increase these attacks.
Q. Who speaks for the resistance?
A. No one. I do not speak for the Baath party or the resistance. But I am very close to both of them. It was decided before the invasion to not establish direct connections with any other party, to prevent penetration and to make it more difficult to get intelligence. … I speak to them by phone, and mostly by Internet. And by direct meetings, when I travel. … Some Arab governments give me passports to facilitate my movement. They play the role of mediating between the resistance and the United States.
Q. What is the U.S. attitude toward the Baath party?
A. The Americans, generals and others, contacted President Saddam in prison and spoke about the situation in Baghdad and around Iraq,. Rumsfeld met him, and Condoleezza Rice, too. She met him. And before her, Rumsfeld met him. They both tried to convince him to make statements calling on the resistance to lay down their arms and to cooperate in the so-called political process. He rejected that. But they told him, you can choose between the fate of Mussolini and the fate of Napoleon Bonaparte. Later, they alluded to something else, involving the return of the Baath party … And now some Arab governments are pressuring the United States to accept the return of the Baath party to guarantee the stability of Iraq. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and some other Gulf states have contacted the United States to convince the United States to reinstate the Baath party as the only solution to minimize Iranian influence in the region.… The Baath party has taken a decision to build a National Front in Iraq, including other parties, including some Kurdish groups.
Q. Would Ayatollah Sistani cooperate?
A. Sistani is nothing. No one listens to him. He is not Iraqi. He will not remain in Iraq after liberation.
Q. It looks like a civil war.
A. Civil war in Iraq will never happen. In my family, there are many Shiites and Sunnis. And the majority of Iraqis are like this. So how can I kill my brother?
Q. Many Iraqis are being polarized by the killings, driven to sectarianism.
A. It is not sectarian fighting. It is political fighting. In the highest leadership of the resistance there are Shiites and Sunnis, Christians and Muslims. They are working together inside the resistance, including Kurds and Turkmen. … The people of Iraq are increasingly blaming Iran and the United States for the killing. … Iran wants to control the area, by using their influence among the Shiites. And who brought the Iranian gangs to Iraq? The United States. You remember, after the attack on Iraq in 1998, after Desert Fox, the Americans concluded that there is no way to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein without cooperating with Iran. So they started their cooperation with Iran, and it began in Europe. And the center of it was Abdel Aziz Hakim. And then Sistani made a fatwa calling on Iraqis to not resist the American invasion, and another fatwa to cooperate with the occupation. And who is supporting the Maliki government? Who supported the Jaafari government? The United States. They are Iranians. Those who are ruling Iraq since the invasion are not Iraqis.
Q. What about the possibility of a military coup in Iraq?
A. If the United States wants to give power in Iraq to the generals, through a military coup, as they are hinting about, that military coup will be [sympathetic to] the Baathists. If its leader is not pro-Baathist, there will be a second coup against that leader. … Because all officers in the Iraqi army, the old army and the new army, are under the control of the Baath party. So there is no solution outside the Baath party.
The increase in the volume of mass killings has increased the willingness of the Iraqi people to accept a military coup. I would say that 80 per cent of the Iraqi people are willing to accept it, to accept anything that would help to crush the Iranian gangs [i.e., the Mahdi Army and the SCIRI’s Badr Brigade]. That coup will be supported by the United States, to purge the Iranian gangs and groups, and destroy them by military might and to establish a military dictatorship for some time. … But those who support a military coup will accept a Baathist coup, a second coup. … The United States has made contact with some Iraqis, old generals, old army Baathist generals, to topple the government of Maliki. They are based in Jordan. Some of them accepted to cooperate with the United States, to crack down on the Mahdi Army and other gangs. And they contacted some tribes in Anbar. They are preparing an attack on Iranian gangs in Iraq, and it will happen, soon.
You know, Iran has said, if it is attacked by the United States, it will attack American troops in Iraq. And this kind of threat is a very serious one. If you combine the attacks on the United States by the Iranian gangs with the attacks of the armed resistance, it will be a big tragedy for the United States. So the American government is trying to minimize the influence of Iranian forces in Iraq before any practical move against Iran.
If [a coup] happens it will be a crazy move by the United States. It will prove again that the United States doesn’t understand the Iraqi situation. Most of the army, the old army, 99 per cent of them, are Baathists. Either the new generals will cooperate with the Baath party, or they will be toppled by the Baath party.
Q. How strong is the Iraqi resistance?
A. The armed resistance has finished all the preparations to control power in Iraq. The middle class collaborators with the United States have started the leave Iraq already. Most of them are outside Iraq: Ahmed Chalabi, Iyad Allawi and others. A second wave of agents are preparing to leave, and some have already left, to Jordan, to Syria, to Britain, and some other places, because the strategic conflict, practically speaking, has reached the point of putting an end to the occupation. The resistance is controlling Baghdad now. Yesterday, I spoke to many people, and they said that the attack on the American base was part of a new strategy to inflict heavy casualties on American troops in Iraq.
Q. I’ve read that many tribal leaders in Iraq are calling for the release of Saddam Hussein, and others want to cooperate with Maliki.
A. Those who are working with Maliki are living in Jordan, not inside Iraq. They do not dare return to Iraq, especially those who are from Anbar Province, so they have no weight inside Iraq. As for those who are sending messages to release President Saddam, they constitute the overwhelming majority of the tribes in Iraq. It is becoming a national phenomenon. … It started suddenly, hundreds of messages from tribal leaders from the north to the south of Iraq.
Q. Are their pro-Baathist forces in the National Assembly?
A. They are not representing us, but they are sympathetic. They are demanding the elimination of the de-Baathification law, and to open direct dialogue with Baathists. They say that it is nonsense to talk about national reconciliation without including the Baathists in the dialogue. Even Allawi and his group were part of this.
I assure you, the resistance has the upper hand in Iraq. The only thing we are worried about is the direct intervention by Iran. Otherwise, everything is guaranteed. Within four or five hours we can impose security and stability in Iraq after the Americans withdraw. That’s why we want the UN Security Council to declare its opposition to any outside intervention in Iraq, to guarantee that Iran won’t intervene in Iraq. Otherwise, those people allied with the United States will have to leave when the United States leaves. The resistance holds the ground almost everywhere in Iraq.
Q. What is the role of Muqtada al-Sadr? Can you have a dialogue with him?
No. Muqtada is allied with Iran. … Now he is more dangerous than the Badr Brigade. The harm being inflicted on Iraqi society is from the [Sadr’s] Mahdi Army. The Badr group was crippled by the resistance.
Q. Why don’t we see a resistance movement in the Shiite areas of Iraq?
A. There are Shiites occupying high positions inside the resistance, with the Baathists. No other organization has popular support inside Iraq. But the media does not cover what is going on in the south. The nature of the operations in the south is not like the resistance operations in Anbar and Baghdad. It is directed against the so-called Hakim group [the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI] and the Mahdi Army, who are killing the nationalists, cooperating with the occupation. They are killing more people than the occupation forces are. But there is a silent majority in the south, which is against the occupation and against Iran. They are fed up with the crimes of the pro-Iranian groups.
You know, in the south, in many cities, Iran even has official offices, and the Iranian intelligence service is controlling areas of southern Iraq. They are using Iranian money. You can tell a taxi driver, “Got to the office of the Iranian intelligence service,” and they will take you. But the silent majority in the south is fed up with Iranian influence in that area. That’s why we are not concerned with the situation in the south, except for the threat of direct Iranian intervention.
The legitimate army has been rebuilt, the army that went underground in the invasion. Ands they are ready to control Iraq right now. Ninety per cent of all Iraqi resistance is made up of Iraqi army. There are highly qualified officers of the Iraqi army are leading nearly all resistance operations in Iraq.
They built the Iraqi army on a sectarian basis, with Badr Brigade and pesh merga [the Kurdish militias]. But there are some nationalists inside the army, and the resistance gets information from nationalist officers inside the official army.
Q. Will there be a Tet Offensive-type of attack? Will the Green Zone come under attack?
A. There has been talk in Baghdad about liberating the Green Zone, especially over the past few weeks. But this is not likely for the time being, because the strategy of the resistance is based on collecting points, as in boxing. You collect points, one by one, to see who is winning. So you exhaust the enemy, by attacking from time to time, until he collapses. The victory of the resistance in Iraq will not be achieved by one battle.
We expect the first month of next year will be decisive. The Americans are exhausted, and the resistance is preparing simultaneous attacks on American forces everywhere. The increase in U.S. casualties are rising sharply as part of a decision by the resistance to increase these attacks.
Q. Who speaks for the resistance?
A. No one. I do not speak for the Baath party or the resistance. But I am very close to both of them. It was decided before the invasion to not establish direct connections with any other party, to prevent penetration and to make it more difficult to get intelligence. … I speak to them by phone, and mostly by Internet. And by direct meetings, when I travel. … Some Arab governments give me passports to facilitate my movement. They play the role of mediating between the resistance and the United States.
Q. What is the U.S. attitude toward the Baath party?
A. The Americans, generals and others, contacted President Saddam in prison and spoke about the situation in Baghdad and around Iraq,. Rumsfeld met him, and Condoleezza Rice, too. She met him. And before her, Rumsfeld met him. They both tried to convince him to make statements calling on the resistance to lay down their arms and to cooperate in the so-called political process. He rejected that. But they told him, you can choose between the fate of Mussolini and the fate of Napoleon Bonaparte. Later, they alluded to something else, involving the return of the Baath party … And now some Arab governments are pressuring the United States to accept the return of the Baath party to guarantee the stability of Iraq. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and some other Gulf states have contacted the United States to convince the United States to reinstate the Baath party as the only solution to minimize Iranian influence in the region.… The Baath party has taken a decision to build a National Front in Iraq, including other parties, including some Kurdish groups.
Q. Would Ayatollah Sistani cooperate?
A. Sistani is nothing. No one listens to him. He is not Iraqi. He will not remain in Iraq after liberation.
Q. It looks like a civil war.
A. Civil war in Iraq will never happen. In my family, there are many Shiites and Sunnis. And the majority of Iraqis are like this. So how can I kill my brother?
Q. Many Iraqis are being polarized by the killings, driven to sectarianism.
A. It is not sectarian fighting. It is political fighting. In the highest leadership of the resistance there are Shiites and Sunnis, Christians and Muslims. They are working together inside the resistance, including Kurds and Turkmen. … The people of Iraq are increasingly blaming Iran and the United States for the killing. … Iran wants to control the area, by using their influence among the Shiites. And who brought the Iranian gangs to Iraq? The United States. You remember, after the attack on Iraq in 1998, after Desert Fox, the Americans concluded that there is no way to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein without cooperating with Iran. So they started their cooperation with Iran, and it began in Europe. And the center of it was Abdel Aziz Hakim. And then Sistani made a fatwa calling on Iraqis to not resist the American invasion, and another fatwa to cooperate with the occupation. And who is supporting the Maliki government? Who supported the Jaafari government? The United States. They are Iranians. Those who are ruling Iraq since the invasion are not Iraqis.
Q. What about the possibility of a military coup in Iraq?
A. If the United States wants to give power in Iraq to the generals, through a military coup, as they are hinting about, that military coup will be [sympathetic to] the Baathists. If its leader is not pro-Baathist, there will be a second coup against that leader. … Because all officers in the Iraqi army, the old army and the new army, are under the control of the Baath party. So there is no solution outside the Baath party.
The increase in the volume of mass killings has increased the willingness of the Iraqi people to accept a military coup. I would say that 80 per cent of the Iraqi people are willing to accept it, to accept anything that would help to crush the Iranian gangs [i.e., the Mahdi Army and the SCIRI’s Badr Brigade]. That coup will be supported by the United States, to purge the Iranian gangs and groups, and destroy them by military might and to establish a military dictatorship for some time. … But those who support a military coup will accept a Baathist coup, a second coup. … The United States has made contact with some Iraqis, old generals, old army Baathist generals, to topple the government of Maliki. They are based in Jordan. Some of them accepted to cooperate with the United States, to crack down on the Mahdi Army and other gangs. And they contacted some tribes in Anbar. They are preparing an attack on Iranian gangs in Iraq, and it will happen, soon.
You know, Iran has said, if it is attacked by the United States, it will attack American troops in Iraq. And this kind of threat is a very serious one. If you combine the attacks on the United States by the Iranian gangs with the attacks of the armed resistance, it will be a big tragedy for the United States. So the American government is trying to minimize the influence of Iranian forces in Iraq before any practical move against Iran.
If [a coup] happens it will be a crazy move by the United States. It will prove again that the United States doesn’t understand the Iraqi situation. Most of the army, the old army, 99 per cent of them, are Baathists. Either the new generals will cooperate with the Baath party, or they will be toppled by the Baath party.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
US troops call for Iraq pullout
Wednesday 25 October 2006, 21:50 Makka Time, 18:50 GMT
More than 200 men and women from the United States armed services have joined a protest calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, organisers say.
The soldiers said they did not think it was worth their while to be in Iraq and questioned the use of repeated tours of duty.
The campaign, called the Appeal for Redress from the War in Iraq, takes advantage of defence department rules allowing active duty troops to express personal opinions to politicians without fear of retaliation.
The appeal posted on the campaign's website at www.appealforredress.org said: "As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq.
"Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for US troops to come home."
The website allows service members to sign the appeal that will be presented to members of Congress. Organisers said the number of signatories had climbed from 65 to 219 since the appeal was posted a few days ago and Wednesday when it was publicly launched.
There are 140,000 US troops in Iraq.
Personal views
Military service personnel on active duty are restricted in expressing their personal views , but rules in the Military Whistleblower Protection Act give them the right to speak to a member of Congress while off duty and out of uniform, while making it clear that they do not speak for the military.
"Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for US troops to come home"
Appeal for Redress from the War in Iraq website
In a conference call with reporters, a sailor, a marine and a soldier who had served in the Iraq operation said American troops there have increasingly had difficulty seeing the purpose of lengthy and repeated tours of duty since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Their misgivings have intensified this year, they said.
"The real grievances are: Why are we in Iraq if the weapons of mass destruction are not found, if the links to al-Qaeda are not substantiated," Marine Sergeant Liam Madden, who was in Iraq from September 2004 to February 2005, said.
Navy Seaman Jonathan Hutto, the first serviceman to join the campaign, said a similar appeal during the Vietnam war drew support from more than 250,000 active duty service members in the early 1970s.
More than 200 men and women from the United States armed services have joined a protest calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, organisers say.
The soldiers said they did not think it was worth their while to be in Iraq and questioned the use of repeated tours of duty.
The campaign, called the Appeal for Redress from the War in Iraq, takes advantage of defence department rules allowing active duty troops to express personal opinions to politicians without fear of retaliation.
The appeal posted on the campaign's website at www.appealforredress.org said: "As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq.
"Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for US troops to come home."
The website allows service members to sign the appeal that will be presented to members of Congress. Organisers said the number of signatories had climbed from 65 to 219 since the appeal was posted a few days ago and Wednesday when it was publicly launched.
There are 140,000 US troops in Iraq.
Personal views
Military service personnel on active duty are restricted in expressing their personal views , but rules in the Military Whistleblower Protection Act give them the right to speak to a member of Congress while off duty and out of uniform, while making it clear that they do not speak for the military.
"Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for US troops to come home"
Appeal for Redress from the War in Iraq website
In a conference call with reporters, a sailor, a marine and a soldier who had served in the Iraq operation said American troops there have increasingly had difficulty seeing the purpose of lengthy and repeated tours of duty since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Their misgivings have intensified this year, they said.
"The real grievances are: Why are we in Iraq if the weapons of mass destruction are not found, if the links to al-Qaeda are not substantiated," Marine Sergeant Liam Madden, who was in Iraq from September 2004 to February 2005, said.
Navy Seaman Jonathan Hutto, the first serviceman to join the campaign, said a similar appeal during the Vietnam war drew support from more than 250,000 active duty service members in the early 1970s.
Monday, October 16, 2006
You wouldn’t catch me dead in Iraq
The Sunday Times August 27, 2006
Report
You wouldn’t catch me dead in Iraq
Scores of American troops are deserting — even from the front line in Iraq. But where have they gone? And why isn’t the US Army after them? Peter Laufer tracked down four of the deserters
They are the US troops in Iraq to whom the American administration prefers not to draw attention. They are the deserters – those who have gone Awol from their units and not returned, risking imprisonment and opprobrium.
When First Lieutenant Ehren Watada of the US Army, who faced a court martial in August, refused to go to Iraq on moral grounds, the newspapers in his home state of Hawaii were full of letters accusing him of “treason”. He said he had concluded that the war is both morally wrong and a horrible breach of American law. His participation, he stated, would make him party to “war crimes”. Watada is just one conscientious objector to a war that has polarised America, arguably more so than even the Vietnam war.
It is impossible to put a precise figure on the number of American troops who have left the army as a result of the US involvement in Iraq. The Pentagon says that a total of 40,000 troops have deserted their posts (not simply those serving in Iraq) since the year 2000. This includes many who went Awol for family reasons. The Pentagon’s spokesmen say that the overall number of deserters has actually gone down since operations began in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there is no doubt that a steady trickle of deserters who object to the Iraq war have made it over the border and are now living in Canada. There they seek asylum, often with the help of Canadian anti-war groups. One Toronto lawyer, Jeffry House, has represented at least 20 deserters from Iraq in the Canadian courts; he is himself a conscientious objector, having refused to fight in the Vietnam war – along with 50,000 others, at the peak of the conflict. He estimates that 200 troops have already gone underground in Canada since the war in Iraq began.
These conscientious objectors are a brave group – their decisions will result in long-term life changes. To be labelled a deserter is no small burden. If convicted of desertion, they run the risk of a prison sentence – with hard labour. To choose exile can mean lifelong separation from family and friends, as even the most trivial encounter with the police in America – say, over a traffic offence – could lead to jail.
Many of the deserters are not pacifists, against war per se, but they view the Iraq war as wrong. First Lt Watada, for instance, said he would face prison rather than serve in Iraq, though he was prepared to pack his bags for Afghanistan to fight in a war that he considered just. They don’t want to face the military courts, which is why they have decided to flee to Canada. A generation ago, Canada welcomed Vietnam-war draft dodgers and deserters. Today, the political climate is different and the score or so of US deserters who are now north of the border are applying for refugee status. So far, the Canadian government is saying no, so cases rejected for refugee status are going to appeal in the federal courts.
But there is no guarantee that these exiles will ultimately find safe haven in Canada. If the federal courts rule against the soldiers and they then exhaust all further judicial possibilities, they may be deported back to the United States – and that may not be what the Americans want. Their presence in the US will in itself represent yet another public-relations headache for the Bush administration.
DARRELL ANDERSON
First Armored Division, 2-3 Field Artillery, at Giessen, Germany. Age: 24
Darrell Anderson joined the US Army just before the Iraq war started.
“I needed health care, money to go to college, and I needed to take care of my daughter. The military was the only way I could do it,” he tells me. As we chat, basking in the sun on a peaceful Toronto street, he fiddles with his pocket watch, which has a Canadian flag on its face. He’s wearing a peace-symbol necklace.
After fighting for seven months in Iraq, he came home bloodied from combat, with a Purple Heart that proved his sacrifice – and seriously opened his eyes. “When I joined, I wanted to fight,” he says. “I wanted to see combat. I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to save people. I wanted to protect my country.” But soon after he arrived in Iraq, he tells me, he realised that the Iraqis did not want him there, and he heard harsh tales that surprised and distressed him.
“Soldiers were describing to me how they had beaten prisoners to death,” he says. “There were three guys and one said, ‘I kicked him from this side of the head while the other guy kicked him in the head and the other guy punched him, and he just died.’ People I knew. They were boasting about it, about how they had beaten people to death.” He says it again: “Boasting about how they had beaten people to death. They are trained killers now. Their friends had died in Iraq. So they weren’t the people they were before they went there.”
Anderson says that even the small talk was difficult to tolerate. “I hate Iraqis,” he quotes his peers as saying. “I hate these damn Muslims.” At first he was puzzled by such talk. “After a while I started to understand. I started to feel the hatred myself. My friends were dying. What am I here for? We went to fight for our country; now we’re just fighting to stay alive.” In addition to taking shrapnel from a roadside bomb – the injury that earned him the Purple Heart – Anderson says he often found himself in firefights. But it was work at a checkpoint that made him seriously question his role. He was guarding the “backside” of a street checkpoint in Baghdad, he says. If a car passed a certain point without stopping, the guards were supposed to open fire.
“A car comes through and it stops in front of my position. Sparks are coming from the car from bad brakes. All the soldiers are yelling. It’s in my vicinity, so it’s my responsibility. I didn’t fire. A superior goes, ‘Why didn’t you fire? You were supposed to fire.’ I said, ‘It was a family!’ At this time it had stopped. You could see the children in the back seat. I said, ‘I did the right thing.’ He’s like, ‘No, you didn’t. It’s procedure to fire. If you don’t do it next time, you’re punished.’”
Anderson shakes his head at the memory. “I’m already not agreeing with this war. I’m not going to kill innocent people. I can’t kill kids. That’s not the way I was raised.” He says he started to look around at the ruined cityscape and the injured Iraqis, and slowly began to understand the Iraqi response. “If someone did this to my street, I would pick up a weapon and fight. I can’t kill these people. They’re not terrorists. They’re 14-year-old boys, they’re old men. We’re occupying the streets. We raid houses. We grab people. We send them off to Abu Ghraib, where they’re tortured. These are innocent people. We stop cars. We hinder everyday life. If I did this in the States, I’d be thrown in prison.”
Birds are singing sweetly as he speaks, a stark contrast to his descriptions of atrocities in Iraq. “I didn’t shoot anybody when I was in Baghdad. We went down to Najaf with howitzers. We shot rounds in Najaf and we killed hundreds of people. I did kill hundreds of people, but not directly, hand-to-hand.”
Anderson went home for Christmas, convinced he would be sent back to the war. He knew he would not be able to live with himself if he returned to Iraq, armed with his first-hand knowledge of what was occurring there day after day. He decided he could no longer participate, and his parents – already opposed to the war –supported his decision. Canada seemed like the best option. After Christmas 2004, he drove from Kentucky to Toronto.
But he says he has had second thoughts about his exile. Not that he is worried much about deportation: he has recently married a Canadian woman and that will probably guarantee him permanent residency. But he plans to return to the US this autumn, and expects to be arrested when he presents himself to authorities at the border. “The war’s still going on,” he told me.
“If I go back, maybe I can still make a difference. My fight is with the American government.”
It’s not only anti-war work that’s motivating him to go home; he’s thinking about his future. “Dealing with all the nightmares and the post-traumatic stress, I need support from my family.”
Anderson expects to be convicted of desertion, and he says he will use his trial and prison time to continue to protest against the war. He imagines that just the sight of him in a dress uniform covered with the medals he was awarded fighting in Iraq will make a powerful statement. “I can’t work every day and act like everything is okay,” he says about his life in Toronto. “This war is beating me down. I haven’t had a dream that wasn’t a nightmare since I came to Canada. It eats away at me to try and act like everything’s okay when it’s not.” Not that he feels his time in Canada was a waste. “There was no way I could have gone to prison at the time: I would have killed myself. I was way too messed up in the head to even think of sitting in a prison cell. I owe a lot to Canada. It has saved my life. When I came back and was talking about the war, Americans called me a traitor. Canadians helped me when I was at my lowest point.”
JOSHUA KEY
43rd Company of Combat Engineers, at Fort Carson, Colorado. Age: 28
We was going along the Euphrates river,” says Joshua Key, detailing a recurring nightmare that features a scene he stumbled into shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. “It’s a road right in the city of Ramadi. We turned a sharp right and all I seen was decapitated bodies. The heads laying over here and the bodies over there and US troops in between them. I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, what in the hell happened here? What’s caused this? Why in the hell did this happen?’ We get out and somebody was screaming, ‘We f***ing lost it here!’ I’m thinking, ‘Oh yes, somebody definitely lost it here.’” Key says he was ordered to look for evidence of a firefight, for something to explain what had happened to the beheaded Iraqis. “I look around just for a few seconds and I don’t see anything.”
Then he witnessed the sight that still triggers the nightmares. “I see two soldiers kicking the heads around like soccer balls. I just shut my mouth, walked back, got inside the tank, shut the door, and thought, ‘I can’t be no part of this. This is crazy. I came here to fight and be prepared for war, but this is outrageous.’”
He’s convinced that there was no firefight.
“A lot of my friends stayed on the ground, looking to see if there was any shells. There was never no shells.” He still cannot get the scene out of his mind: “You just see heads everywhere. You wake up, you’ll just be sitting there, like you’re in a foxhole. I can still see Iraq just as clearly as it was the day I was there. You’ll just be on the side of a little river running through the city, trash piled up, filled with dead. I don’t sleep that much, you might say.” His wife, Brandi, nods in agreement, and says that he cries in his sleep.
We’re sitting on the back porch of the Toronto house where Key and his wife and their four small children have been living in exile since Key deserted to Canada. They’ve settled in a rent-free basement apartment, courtesy of a landlord sympathetic to their plight. Joshua smokes one cigarette after another and drinks coffee while we talk. There’s a scraggly beard on his still-boyish face; his eyes look weary.
Key rejects the American government line that the Iraqis fighting the occupation are terrorists. “I’m thinking, ‘What the hell?’ I mean, that’s not a terrorist. That’s the man’s home. That’s his son, that’s the father, that’s the mother, that’s the sister. Houses are destroyed. Husbands are detained, and wives don’t even know where they’re at. I mean, them are pissed-off people, and they have a reason to be. I would never wish this upon myself or my family, so why would I wish it upon them?”
On security duty in the Iraqi streets, Key found himself talking to the locals. He was surprised by how many spoke English, and he was frustrated by the military regulations that forbade him to accept dinner invitations in their homes. “I’m not your perfect killing machine,” he admits. “That’s where I broke the rules. I broke the rules by having a conscience.” And the more time he spent in Iraq, the more his conscience developed. “I was trained to be a total killer. I was trained in booby traps, explosives, landmines.” He pauses. “Hell, if you want to get technical about it, I was made to be an American terrorist. I was trained in everything that a terrorist is trained to do.” In case I might have missed his point, he says it again. “I mean terrorist.” Deserting seemed the only viable alternative, Key says. He did it, he insists, because he was lied to “by my president”. Iraq – it was obvious to him – was no threat to the US.
Key feels that some of his unit were trigger-happy. He recalls another incident that haunts him. He was in an armoured personnel carrier when an Iraqi man in a truck cut them off, making a wrong turn. One of his squad started firing at the truck. “The first shot, the truck sort of started slowing down,” Key recounts. “And then he shot the next shot, and when he shot that next shot, it, you know, exploded.” Key watched the truck turn to debris. “It was very strange. He was just going along and because he tried to cut in front of us… No kind of combat reasons or anything of such…”
Key seems still in shock at the utter senselessness of it all. “Why did it happen and what was the cause for it? When I asked that question, I was told, basically, ‘You didn’t see anything, you know?’ Nobody asked no questions.” Assigned to raid houses, Key was soon appalled by the job. “I mean, yeah, they’re screaming and hollering out their lungs. It’s traumatic on both parts because you’ve got somebody yelling at you, which might be a woman. You’re yelling back at her, telling her to get on the ground or get out of the house. She don’t know what you’re saying and vice versa. It got to me. We’re the ones sending their husbands or their children off, and when you do that, it gets even more traumatic because then they’re distraught. Of course, you can’t comfort them because you don’t know what to say.”
While the residents are restrained, the search progresses. “Oh, you completely destroy the home – completely destroy it,” he says. “If there’s like cabinets or something that’s locked, you kick them in. The soldiers take what they want. Completely ransack it.” He estimates that he participated in about 100 raids. “I never found anything in a home. You might find one AK-47, but that’s for personal use. But I never once found the big caches of weapons they supposed were there. I never once found members of the Ba’ath party, terrorists, insurgents. We never found any of that.”
A soldier’s life was never Joshua Key’s dream. He was living in Guthrie, Oklahoma, just looking for a decent job. “We had two kids at the time and my third boy was on the way,” he says. “There’s no work there. There wasn’t going to be a future. Of course you can get a job working at McDonald’s, but that wasn’t going to pay the bills.” The local army-recruiting station beckoned. Shortly after he finished basic training, he was en route to the war zone. After eight months of fighting, he received two weeks’ leave back in the US. At the end of that, he was due for another Iraq tour.
He didn’t report for duty. Key and his wife packed up, took their children and ran, with the intention of getting as far from his base in familiar Colorado as possible. The family ran out of money in Philadelphia, and Key found work as a welder. They lived an underground lifestyle for over a year, frequently checking out of one hotel and into another, worried that if they stayed too long at one place they would attract attention. “I was paranoid,” Key says, and he contemplated deserting to Canada.
The research was easy. He went online and searched for “deserter needs help to go Awol”. Up popped details about others who had escaped across the border. He and Brandi decided to opt for a new life as Canadians. George W Bush should be the one to go to prison, says Key.
“On the day he goes to prison, I’ll go sit in prison with him. Let’s go. I’ll face it for that music. But that ain’t never going to happen,” he laughs.
RYAN JOHNSON
211th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Barstow, California. Age: 22
Twenty-two-year-old Ryan Johnson meets me at his Catholic hostel in Toronto wearing a black T-shirt, blue jeans and black running shoes. When Ryan went Awol in January 2005, he simply went home to Visalia, California. “It was very stressful,” he says. “I lived only four hours away from my home base. I figured they could come get me at any time. But they never came by. They never came looking for me. They sent some letters – that’s all they did.” The military doesn’t devote significant manpower to chasing Awol soldiers and deserters, other than issuing a federal arrest warrant. Those who get caught are usually arrested for something unrelated, their Awol status revealed when local police enter their names into the National Crime Information Center database – a routine post-arrest procedure throughout the United States.
Johnson moved to Canada because he was afraid that if he applied for a job, a background check would cause him to be arrested and give him a criminal record that would make it even more difficult for him to find work in the future. Voluntarily turning himself in to the US Army would not have improved his options, either.
“I had two choices: go to Iraq and have my life messed up, or go to jail and have my life messed up. So I came here to try this out.”
Back at his base in the southern California desert, Johnson had listened hard to the stories told by soldiers returning from the war.
“I didn’t want to be a part of that,” he says. I remind him that, unlike in the Vietnam era, there was no draft when he became eligible to join the army. He went down to the Visalia recruiting office and signed up. Did he really not know then that the army was in the business of killing people? “That’s true, yeah, they are,” he acknowledges. “But what I didn’t understand is how traumatising it was to actually kill somebody or watch one of your friends get killed. I’ve never seen anyone die.
“When I joined,” he says, “I joined because I was poor.” He says that jobs were hard to come by in Visalia and he lacked the funds for college. The sign in the strip mall outside the recruiting office beckoned, despite the fact that war was already burning up the Iraqi desert and sending GIs home dead.
“I talked to the recruiters,” says Johnson.
“I said, ‘What are the chances of me going to Iraq?’ They said, ‘Depends on what job you get.’ So I said, ‘What jobs could I get that wouldn’t have me go to Iraq?’ And they named jobs. I picked one of those and they said that I probably wouldn’t go to Iraq.”
Johnson was too unsophisticated to ask probing questions at the army recruiting office, and he didn’t question many of the answers he did receive. “I was 20 years old,” he says defensively. “I thought we were rebuilding in Iraq. I thought we were doing good things. But we’re blowing up mosques. We’re blowing up museums, people’s homes, all the culture. I mean, I didn’t even realise Iraq was Mesopotamia, you know? There’s all this culture and everything in Iraq. I like to think of myself as pretty well educated for someone that didn’t even graduate high school, but I’ve never really known anything about history or other cultures.
“The soldiers that are going to Iraq, most of them aren’t patriotic,” he says. “They aren’t going to Iraq because our flag has red, white and blue on it. They’re not going because they think that Iraq is posing a threat to us. Most of us are going because we’re ordered to and our buddies are going. That’s one of the reasons that I was going to go – because my buddies are over there.”
He is immediately wistful when asked how he feels about being safe in peaceful Toronto while those buddies are fighting and dying in the desert: “I check the casualties list every day. Every day I go on the internet and I check the casualties list to see if my friends are on there. And as of yet,” he pauses, “seven people from my unit have died, and I knew four of them.”
Johnson is unwilling to consider a return to America and time in prison. “It seems absolutely insane,” he says. “They’ll put someone in jail for five years for not wanting to kill somebody. I’m trying to avoid killing people. I know if I went to Iraq I would kill somebody. If I got put on patrol I would probably shoot somebody, because I would know that it’s them or me, you know? And they feel the same way. If I don’t kill these guys, they’re going to kill me.”
Johnson is hoping to feel at home in Canada. His introduction to the new country when he drove across the border was unexpectedly welcoming. He tried to give his ID to the border guard, but she was not interested in checking it. She just said: “‘Welcome to Canada.’ Yeah, that’s what she said. She said, ‘Welcome to Canada.’ And I said, ‘Thank you!’ and then we crossed the border and my wife, Jennifer, screamed.”
However, Johnson is now appealing, as his initial request for refugee status in Canada has been rejected by the Canadian authorities.
IVAN BROBECK
2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Age: 21
Aged 21, former Lance Corporal Ivan Brobeck has an inviting smile. We meet in a park near his new home in Toronto. “I knew I couldn’t take it any more,” he says of his decision to desert to Canada. “I just needed to get away, because my unit was scheduled to go back to Iraq for a second time and I couldn’t take any more.”
Brobeck had no problem staying in the military, but he decided that he was not accepting orders to return to Iraq, and desertion seemed his only alternative. He spent much of 2004 on duty in Iraq. He fought in Falluja, and lost friends to roadside bombs “You tend to be very angry over there, because you’re fighting for something you don’t believe in, and your friends are dying,” he tells me.
His war stories feel out of place in the peaceful, upmarket Toronto neighbourhood where we are talking. During battles, he says he operated “on autopilot”, fighting for survival.
“I started thinking about what was wrong while I was over there, but it didn’t really get to me until the end of my stay in Iraq – and definitely once I was back home.”
Back at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, Brobeck says he began to consider “the totally bad stuff that shouldn’t have happened” during his watch. “I have seen the beating of innocent prisoners,” he says. “I remember hearing something get thrown off the back of a seven-ton truck. The bed of a seven-ton is probably something like 7 or 8ft high. They threw a detainee off the back, his hands tied behind his back and a sandbag over his head, so he couldn’t brace for the impact. I remember he started convulsing after he hit the ground and we thought he was snoring. We took the bag off his head and his eyes were swollen shut and his nose was plugged with blood and he could barely even breathe.”
In addition to the abuse of prisoners, the regularity with which civilians were killed at checkpoints confounded the young marine. “My friends have been ones who’ve done that, and after the event it’s always, ‘Oh, so and so is a little down today – he killed a guy in front of his kids.’ Or, ‘He killed a couple of kids.’ These marines that had to do that were my friends, who I talked to every day. It’s hard knowing that your best friend had to kill innocent people.”
Brobeck started to develop sympathy for the enemy. “A lot of people that shoot back at us aren’t bad people. They’re people who had their wives killed or their sons killed and they’re just trying to get retribution, get revenge and kill the person who killed their son. They’re just innocent people who lost a whole lot and don’t have anything else to do.”
Brobeck was a marine for a year before being deployed to Iraq. “I always heard all these great things that the US military have done throughout history, like great battles that they’ve won. Out of all the forces I knew, the marines were the toughest, most hard core. I wanted to do that. I was willing to risk my life for an actual cause,” he muses, “if there was one.”
What would be a cause worth dying for? “A good cause” is his answer. “But this war doesn’t benefit anyone. It doesn’t benefit Americans, it doesn’t even benefit Iraq. This is not something that anyone should fight and die for. I was only 17 when I signed my contract, and my whole childhood, all I did was play video games and sports. I didn’t pay attention to the news. That stuff was boring to me. But I know first-hand now.”
Last July his unit shipped out without him. “The day I decided to actually leave was sort of a spur-of-the-moment thing. I had wanted to for so long, I just couldn’t bring myself to actually do it, because going Awol is definitely a huge decision, and it’s like throwing away a lot of your life. Plus, I didn’t know what I was going to do if I went Awol.”
The night before leaving, Brobeck confided his intentions to another marine. “He said, ‘You’ve been to Iraq; I haven’t. You have your reasons for going Awol and I’m not going to stop you.’” The departure from the North Carolina base was easy.
“I walked to a bus station and stayed at a hotel that night. The only way I could get home was by bus, and the station was closed. When the Greyhound station opened, I got my ticket and left for Virginia. I was nervous because reveille, the time we wake up, was at 5.30, and they would have definitely noticed I was missing. I thought they would have checked the Greyhound station, the only one near the base. They didn’t, which was good. I didn’t go home to my mom, because I was worried about police being there. I stayed with a friend.”
Twenty-eight days after he went Awol, Brobeck headed for Canada. He discovered the website maintained by the War Resisters Support Campaign, a group of Canadians organising aid for American deserters, and learnt that there would be help from them were he to flee north to Toronto.
He called his mother and together they drove across the Niagara Falls crossing point.
“She doesn’t like the fact that I’m away in Canada and can’t come back to see her,” he says, “but it’s better than me going back to Iraq for a second time.”
Exile in Canada feels good for Brobeck. “Life feels for me, even if I wasn’t Awol, freer up here than it would in America. Everyone is so polite in Canada, friendly.” In the year since he crossed the border, he has met and married his wife, Lisa. His application for refugee status has been denied, but he has hopes of winning his appeal.
“The only thing I left behind was my family and my friends,” he says. “So that’s the only thing I’m going to miss about America – the people.
“The US used to be something you could say you were proud of,” he adds. “You go to another country now and say that you’re an American, you probably won’t get a lot of happy faces or open arms, because of the man in charge. It’s amazing what one person can do. The leadership totally screwed up any respect we had.” His rejection of US policy in Iraq is making him question his sense of national identity. “In my heart I’m not American… if it means I have to conform to what they stand for,” he says about the Bush administration. “I’m not American because America has lost touch with what they were. The founding fathers would definitely be pissed off if they found out what America’s become.”
Mission Rejected, by Peter Laufer, is published in the US by Chelsea Green, and will be published in the UK in January 2007 by John Blake
THE BRITONS WHO ARE SAYING NO
It’s not just Americans: hundreds of our own troops have ‘retreated’ from Iraq. Philip Jacobson reports
Over 2,000 members of Britain’s armed forces have gone long-term Awol since the war in Iraq started, and most are still missing. Before the fighting began, about 375 absconders a year were at large for any length of time, and were dismissed; that figure rose to 720 last year. About 740 men are thought to be on the run still, but have not yet been disciplined.
While the MoD denies that this trend reflects growing opposition to the war, lawyers specialising in court martials report a continuing increase in requests for advice from personnel desperate to avoid being posted to Iraq. Although the overall number of Awol cases has been fairly stable for a few years (about 2,500 annually), there is growing concern in the military about the “Iraq factor”. Before, most absconders were Awol for a relatively short time, typically owing to family or financial problems, or bullying, and either went back to their units voluntarily or were arrested quickly. Most were disciplined by their commanding officers; punishments ranged from demotion to “jankers”, a spell in a military jail.
But it seems that a growing number are ready to risk a charge of desertion — a far more serious offence than going Awol, with penalties to match. According to Gilbert Blades, an expert on military law, the MoD is playing down the true extent of the problem. “It is absolutely clear to me,” he says, “that the crucial factor in driving up Awol levels has been what more and more service people consider to be an illegal conflict.” As Blades sees it, the tightening of the legal definition of desertion in new legislation going through parliament is intended to deter potential absconders. Under the new Armed Forces Bill, people refusing active-service duty in a foreign country could be jailed for life. “It seems obvious this is a direct response to the situation that has developed as the war has intensified,” he says.
Two cases this year have highlighted the issue of morally motivated “refuseniks” in the forces. Ben Griffin, an SAS soldier stationed in Baghdad, told his commanding officer that he was no longer willing to fight alongside “gung-ho and trigger-happy” US troops. Griffin fully expected his eight-year career to end in a court martial and imprisonment, but he was allowed to leave and was given a glowing testimonial to his “strength of character”. Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, an RAF doctor, received eight months in prison for rejecting orders to report for a third tour of duty in Basra on the grounds that the occupation was illegal. He was later freed, but spent the rest of his sentence under house arrest.
An MoD spokeswoman told The Sunday Times Magazine that claims that the level of desertions was rocketing were untrue. “There is a good deal of confusion about this, because people often don’t understand the distinction between deserting and going absent without leave. Only 21 cases of desertion have been recorded over the past five years, and just one person has been convicted of that offence since 1989.” She also said criticism of the new legislation was “misguided and sometimes malicious”. Under the present military legal system, she explained, each arm of the forces administers its own discipline. This no longer reflects an era in which combined operations are becoming common. “It makes sense in the circumstances to have a single law addressing matters of military discipline for all service personnel.” But Blades argues that the clause providing for life sentences in the event of refusal to serve in a foreign combat zone “was driven through solely by the defence establishment to provide a drastic legal remedy to the problem of conscientious objection”. It remains to be seen whether the courts, if pushed, will hand down such a stiff sentence.
Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.
Report
You wouldn’t catch me dead in Iraq
Scores of American troops are deserting — even from the front line in Iraq. But where have they gone? And why isn’t the US Army after them? Peter Laufer tracked down four of the deserters
They are the US troops in Iraq to whom the American administration prefers not to draw attention. They are the deserters – those who have gone Awol from their units and not returned, risking imprisonment and opprobrium.
When First Lieutenant Ehren Watada of the US Army, who faced a court martial in August, refused to go to Iraq on moral grounds, the newspapers in his home state of Hawaii were full of letters accusing him of “treason”. He said he had concluded that the war is both morally wrong and a horrible breach of American law. His participation, he stated, would make him party to “war crimes”. Watada is just one conscientious objector to a war that has polarised America, arguably more so than even the Vietnam war.
It is impossible to put a precise figure on the number of American troops who have left the army as a result of the US involvement in Iraq. The Pentagon says that a total of 40,000 troops have deserted their posts (not simply those serving in Iraq) since the year 2000. This includes many who went Awol for family reasons. The Pentagon’s spokesmen say that the overall number of deserters has actually gone down since operations began in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there is no doubt that a steady trickle of deserters who object to the Iraq war have made it over the border and are now living in Canada. There they seek asylum, often with the help of Canadian anti-war groups. One Toronto lawyer, Jeffry House, has represented at least 20 deserters from Iraq in the Canadian courts; he is himself a conscientious objector, having refused to fight in the Vietnam war – along with 50,000 others, at the peak of the conflict. He estimates that 200 troops have already gone underground in Canada since the war in Iraq began.
These conscientious objectors are a brave group – their decisions will result in long-term life changes. To be labelled a deserter is no small burden. If convicted of desertion, they run the risk of a prison sentence – with hard labour. To choose exile can mean lifelong separation from family and friends, as even the most trivial encounter with the police in America – say, over a traffic offence – could lead to jail.
Many of the deserters are not pacifists, against war per se, but they view the Iraq war as wrong. First Lt Watada, for instance, said he would face prison rather than serve in Iraq, though he was prepared to pack his bags for Afghanistan to fight in a war that he considered just. They don’t want to face the military courts, which is why they have decided to flee to Canada. A generation ago, Canada welcomed Vietnam-war draft dodgers and deserters. Today, the political climate is different and the score or so of US deserters who are now north of the border are applying for refugee status. So far, the Canadian government is saying no, so cases rejected for refugee status are going to appeal in the federal courts.
But there is no guarantee that these exiles will ultimately find safe haven in Canada. If the federal courts rule against the soldiers and they then exhaust all further judicial possibilities, they may be deported back to the United States – and that may not be what the Americans want. Their presence in the US will in itself represent yet another public-relations headache for the Bush administration.
DARRELL ANDERSON
First Armored Division, 2-3 Field Artillery, at Giessen, Germany. Age: 24
Darrell Anderson joined the US Army just before the Iraq war started.
“I needed health care, money to go to college, and I needed to take care of my daughter. The military was the only way I could do it,” he tells me. As we chat, basking in the sun on a peaceful Toronto street, he fiddles with his pocket watch, which has a Canadian flag on its face. He’s wearing a peace-symbol necklace.
After fighting for seven months in Iraq, he came home bloodied from combat, with a Purple Heart that proved his sacrifice – and seriously opened his eyes. “When I joined, I wanted to fight,” he says. “I wanted to see combat. I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to save people. I wanted to protect my country.” But soon after he arrived in Iraq, he tells me, he realised that the Iraqis did not want him there, and he heard harsh tales that surprised and distressed him.
“Soldiers were describing to me how they had beaten prisoners to death,” he says. “There were three guys and one said, ‘I kicked him from this side of the head while the other guy kicked him in the head and the other guy punched him, and he just died.’ People I knew. They were boasting about it, about how they had beaten people to death.” He says it again: “Boasting about how they had beaten people to death. They are trained killers now. Their friends had died in Iraq. So they weren’t the people they were before they went there.”
Anderson says that even the small talk was difficult to tolerate. “I hate Iraqis,” he quotes his peers as saying. “I hate these damn Muslims.” At first he was puzzled by such talk. “After a while I started to understand. I started to feel the hatred myself. My friends were dying. What am I here for? We went to fight for our country; now we’re just fighting to stay alive.” In addition to taking shrapnel from a roadside bomb – the injury that earned him the Purple Heart – Anderson says he often found himself in firefights. But it was work at a checkpoint that made him seriously question his role. He was guarding the “backside” of a street checkpoint in Baghdad, he says. If a car passed a certain point without stopping, the guards were supposed to open fire.
“A car comes through and it stops in front of my position. Sparks are coming from the car from bad brakes. All the soldiers are yelling. It’s in my vicinity, so it’s my responsibility. I didn’t fire. A superior goes, ‘Why didn’t you fire? You were supposed to fire.’ I said, ‘It was a family!’ At this time it had stopped. You could see the children in the back seat. I said, ‘I did the right thing.’ He’s like, ‘No, you didn’t. It’s procedure to fire. If you don’t do it next time, you’re punished.’”
Anderson shakes his head at the memory. “I’m already not agreeing with this war. I’m not going to kill innocent people. I can’t kill kids. That’s not the way I was raised.” He says he started to look around at the ruined cityscape and the injured Iraqis, and slowly began to understand the Iraqi response. “If someone did this to my street, I would pick up a weapon and fight. I can’t kill these people. They’re not terrorists. They’re 14-year-old boys, they’re old men. We’re occupying the streets. We raid houses. We grab people. We send them off to Abu Ghraib, where they’re tortured. These are innocent people. We stop cars. We hinder everyday life. If I did this in the States, I’d be thrown in prison.”
Birds are singing sweetly as he speaks, a stark contrast to his descriptions of atrocities in Iraq. “I didn’t shoot anybody when I was in Baghdad. We went down to Najaf with howitzers. We shot rounds in Najaf and we killed hundreds of people. I did kill hundreds of people, but not directly, hand-to-hand.”
Anderson went home for Christmas, convinced he would be sent back to the war. He knew he would not be able to live with himself if he returned to Iraq, armed with his first-hand knowledge of what was occurring there day after day. He decided he could no longer participate, and his parents – already opposed to the war –supported his decision. Canada seemed like the best option. After Christmas 2004, he drove from Kentucky to Toronto.
But he says he has had second thoughts about his exile. Not that he is worried much about deportation: he has recently married a Canadian woman and that will probably guarantee him permanent residency. But he plans to return to the US this autumn, and expects to be arrested when he presents himself to authorities at the border. “The war’s still going on,” he told me.
“If I go back, maybe I can still make a difference. My fight is with the American government.”
It’s not only anti-war work that’s motivating him to go home; he’s thinking about his future. “Dealing with all the nightmares and the post-traumatic stress, I need support from my family.”
Anderson expects to be convicted of desertion, and he says he will use his trial and prison time to continue to protest against the war. He imagines that just the sight of him in a dress uniform covered with the medals he was awarded fighting in Iraq will make a powerful statement. “I can’t work every day and act like everything is okay,” he says about his life in Toronto. “This war is beating me down. I haven’t had a dream that wasn’t a nightmare since I came to Canada. It eats away at me to try and act like everything’s okay when it’s not.” Not that he feels his time in Canada was a waste. “There was no way I could have gone to prison at the time: I would have killed myself. I was way too messed up in the head to even think of sitting in a prison cell. I owe a lot to Canada. It has saved my life. When I came back and was talking about the war, Americans called me a traitor. Canadians helped me when I was at my lowest point.”
JOSHUA KEY
43rd Company of Combat Engineers, at Fort Carson, Colorado. Age: 28
We was going along the Euphrates river,” says Joshua Key, detailing a recurring nightmare that features a scene he stumbled into shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. “It’s a road right in the city of Ramadi. We turned a sharp right and all I seen was decapitated bodies. The heads laying over here and the bodies over there and US troops in between them. I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, what in the hell happened here? What’s caused this? Why in the hell did this happen?’ We get out and somebody was screaming, ‘We f***ing lost it here!’ I’m thinking, ‘Oh yes, somebody definitely lost it here.’” Key says he was ordered to look for evidence of a firefight, for something to explain what had happened to the beheaded Iraqis. “I look around just for a few seconds and I don’t see anything.”
Then he witnessed the sight that still triggers the nightmares. “I see two soldiers kicking the heads around like soccer balls. I just shut my mouth, walked back, got inside the tank, shut the door, and thought, ‘I can’t be no part of this. This is crazy. I came here to fight and be prepared for war, but this is outrageous.’”
He’s convinced that there was no firefight.
“A lot of my friends stayed on the ground, looking to see if there was any shells. There was never no shells.” He still cannot get the scene out of his mind: “You just see heads everywhere. You wake up, you’ll just be sitting there, like you’re in a foxhole. I can still see Iraq just as clearly as it was the day I was there. You’ll just be on the side of a little river running through the city, trash piled up, filled with dead. I don’t sleep that much, you might say.” His wife, Brandi, nods in agreement, and says that he cries in his sleep.
We’re sitting on the back porch of the Toronto house where Key and his wife and their four small children have been living in exile since Key deserted to Canada. They’ve settled in a rent-free basement apartment, courtesy of a landlord sympathetic to their plight. Joshua smokes one cigarette after another and drinks coffee while we talk. There’s a scraggly beard on his still-boyish face; his eyes look weary.
Key rejects the American government line that the Iraqis fighting the occupation are terrorists. “I’m thinking, ‘What the hell?’ I mean, that’s not a terrorist. That’s the man’s home. That’s his son, that’s the father, that’s the mother, that’s the sister. Houses are destroyed. Husbands are detained, and wives don’t even know where they’re at. I mean, them are pissed-off people, and they have a reason to be. I would never wish this upon myself or my family, so why would I wish it upon them?”
On security duty in the Iraqi streets, Key found himself talking to the locals. He was surprised by how many spoke English, and he was frustrated by the military regulations that forbade him to accept dinner invitations in their homes. “I’m not your perfect killing machine,” he admits. “That’s where I broke the rules. I broke the rules by having a conscience.” And the more time he spent in Iraq, the more his conscience developed. “I was trained to be a total killer. I was trained in booby traps, explosives, landmines.” He pauses. “Hell, if you want to get technical about it, I was made to be an American terrorist. I was trained in everything that a terrorist is trained to do.” In case I might have missed his point, he says it again. “I mean terrorist.” Deserting seemed the only viable alternative, Key says. He did it, he insists, because he was lied to “by my president”. Iraq – it was obvious to him – was no threat to the US.
Key feels that some of his unit were trigger-happy. He recalls another incident that haunts him. He was in an armoured personnel carrier when an Iraqi man in a truck cut them off, making a wrong turn. One of his squad started firing at the truck. “The first shot, the truck sort of started slowing down,” Key recounts. “And then he shot the next shot, and when he shot that next shot, it, you know, exploded.” Key watched the truck turn to debris. “It was very strange. He was just going along and because he tried to cut in front of us… No kind of combat reasons or anything of such…”
Key seems still in shock at the utter senselessness of it all. “Why did it happen and what was the cause for it? When I asked that question, I was told, basically, ‘You didn’t see anything, you know?’ Nobody asked no questions.” Assigned to raid houses, Key was soon appalled by the job. “I mean, yeah, they’re screaming and hollering out their lungs. It’s traumatic on both parts because you’ve got somebody yelling at you, which might be a woman. You’re yelling back at her, telling her to get on the ground or get out of the house. She don’t know what you’re saying and vice versa. It got to me. We’re the ones sending their husbands or their children off, and when you do that, it gets even more traumatic because then they’re distraught. Of course, you can’t comfort them because you don’t know what to say.”
While the residents are restrained, the search progresses. “Oh, you completely destroy the home – completely destroy it,” he says. “If there’s like cabinets or something that’s locked, you kick them in. The soldiers take what they want. Completely ransack it.” He estimates that he participated in about 100 raids. “I never found anything in a home. You might find one AK-47, but that’s for personal use. But I never once found the big caches of weapons they supposed were there. I never once found members of the Ba’ath party, terrorists, insurgents. We never found any of that.”
A soldier’s life was never Joshua Key’s dream. He was living in Guthrie, Oklahoma, just looking for a decent job. “We had two kids at the time and my third boy was on the way,” he says. “There’s no work there. There wasn’t going to be a future. Of course you can get a job working at McDonald’s, but that wasn’t going to pay the bills.” The local army-recruiting station beckoned. Shortly after he finished basic training, he was en route to the war zone. After eight months of fighting, he received two weeks’ leave back in the US. At the end of that, he was due for another Iraq tour.
He didn’t report for duty. Key and his wife packed up, took their children and ran, with the intention of getting as far from his base in familiar Colorado as possible. The family ran out of money in Philadelphia, and Key found work as a welder. They lived an underground lifestyle for over a year, frequently checking out of one hotel and into another, worried that if they stayed too long at one place they would attract attention. “I was paranoid,” Key says, and he contemplated deserting to Canada.
The research was easy. He went online and searched for “deserter needs help to go Awol”. Up popped details about others who had escaped across the border. He and Brandi decided to opt for a new life as Canadians. George W Bush should be the one to go to prison, says Key.
“On the day he goes to prison, I’ll go sit in prison with him. Let’s go. I’ll face it for that music. But that ain’t never going to happen,” he laughs.
RYAN JOHNSON
211th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Barstow, California. Age: 22
Twenty-two-year-old Ryan Johnson meets me at his Catholic hostel in Toronto wearing a black T-shirt, blue jeans and black running shoes. When Ryan went Awol in January 2005, he simply went home to Visalia, California. “It was very stressful,” he says. “I lived only four hours away from my home base. I figured they could come get me at any time. But they never came by. They never came looking for me. They sent some letters – that’s all they did.” The military doesn’t devote significant manpower to chasing Awol soldiers and deserters, other than issuing a federal arrest warrant. Those who get caught are usually arrested for something unrelated, their Awol status revealed when local police enter their names into the National Crime Information Center database – a routine post-arrest procedure throughout the United States.
Johnson moved to Canada because he was afraid that if he applied for a job, a background check would cause him to be arrested and give him a criminal record that would make it even more difficult for him to find work in the future. Voluntarily turning himself in to the US Army would not have improved his options, either.
“I had two choices: go to Iraq and have my life messed up, or go to jail and have my life messed up. So I came here to try this out.”
Back at his base in the southern California desert, Johnson had listened hard to the stories told by soldiers returning from the war.
“I didn’t want to be a part of that,” he says. I remind him that, unlike in the Vietnam era, there was no draft when he became eligible to join the army. He went down to the Visalia recruiting office and signed up. Did he really not know then that the army was in the business of killing people? “That’s true, yeah, they are,” he acknowledges. “But what I didn’t understand is how traumatising it was to actually kill somebody or watch one of your friends get killed. I’ve never seen anyone die.
“When I joined,” he says, “I joined because I was poor.” He says that jobs were hard to come by in Visalia and he lacked the funds for college. The sign in the strip mall outside the recruiting office beckoned, despite the fact that war was already burning up the Iraqi desert and sending GIs home dead.
“I talked to the recruiters,” says Johnson.
“I said, ‘What are the chances of me going to Iraq?’ They said, ‘Depends on what job you get.’ So I said, ‘What jobs could I get that wouldn’t have me go to Iraq?’ And they named jobs. I picked one of those and they said that I probably wouldn’t go to Iraq.”
Johnson was too unsophisticated to ask probing questions at the army recruiting office, and he didn’t question many of the answers he did receive. “I was 20 years old,” he says defensively. “I thought we were rebuilding in Iraq. I thought we were doing good things. But we’re blowing up mosques. We’re blowing up museums, people’s homes, all the culture. I mean, I didn’t even realise Iraq was Mesopotamia, you know? There’s all this culture and everything in Iraq. I like to think of myself as pretty well educated for someone that didn’t even graduate high school, but I’ve never really known anything about history or other cultures.
“The soldiers that are going to Iraq, most of them aren’t patriotic,” he says. “They aren’t going to Iraq because our flag has red, white and blue on it. They’re not going because they think that Iraq is posing a threat to us. Most of us are going because we’re ordered to and our buddies are going. That’s one of the reasons that I was going to go – because my buddies are over there.”
He is immediately wistful when asked how he feels about being safe in peaceful Toronto while those buddies are fighting and dying in the desert: “I check the casualties list every day. Every day I go on the internet and I check the casualties list to see if my friends are on there. And as of yet,” he pauses, “seven people from my unit have died, and I knew four of them.”
Johnson is unwilling to consider a return to America and time in prison. “It seems absolutely insane,” he says. “They’ll put someone in jail for five years for not wanting to kill somebody. I’m trying to avoid killing people. I know if I went to Iraq I would kill somebody. If I got put on patrol I would probably shoot somebody, because I would know that it’s them or me, you know? And they feel the same way. If I don’t kill these guys, they’re going to kill me.”
Johnson is hoping to feel at home in Canada. His introduction to the new country when he drove across the border was unexpectedly welcoming. He tried to give his ID to the border guard, but she was not interested in checking it. She just said: “‘Welcome to Canada.’ Yeah, that’s what she said. She said, ‘Welcome to Canada.’ And I said, ‘Thank you!’ and then we crossed the border and my wife, Jennifer, screamed.”
However, Johnson is now appealing, as his initial request for refugee status in Canada has been rejected by the Canadian authorities.
IVAN BROBECK
2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Age: 21
Aged 21, former Lance Corporal Ivan Brobeck has an inviting smile. We meet in a park near his new home in Toronto. “I knew I couldn’t take it any more,” he says of his decision to desert to Canada. “I just needed to get away, because my unit was scheduled to go back to Iraq for a second time and I couldn’t take any more.”
Brobeck had no problem staying in the military, but he decided that he was not accepting orders to return to Iraq, and desertion seemed his only alternative. He spent much of 2004 on duty in Iraq. He fought in Falluja, and lost friends to roadside bombs “You tend to be very angry over there, because you’re fighting for something you don’t believe in, and your friends are dying,” he tells me.
His war stories feel out of place in the peaceful, upmarket Toronto neighbourhood where we are talking. During battles, he says he operated “on autopilot”, fighting for survival.
“I started thinking about what was wrong while I was over there, but it didn’t really get to me until the end of my stay in Iraq – and definitely once I was back home.”
Back at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, Brobeck says he began to consider “the totally bad stuff that shouldn’t have happened” during his watch. “I have seen the beating of innocent prisoners,” he says. “I remember hearing something get thrown off the back of a seven-ton truck. The bed of a seven-ton is probably something like 7 or 8ft high. They threw a detainee off the back, his hands tied behind his back and a sandbag over his head, so he couldn’t brace for the impact. I remember he started convulsing after he hit the ground and we thought he was snoring. We took the bag off his head and his eyes were swollen shut and his nose was plugged with blood and he could barely even breathe.”
In addition to the abuse of prisoners, the regularity with which civilians were killed at checkpoints confounded the young marine. “My friends have been ones who’ve done that, and after the event it’s always, ‘Oh, so and so is a little down today – he killed a guy in front of his kids.’ Or, ‘He killed a couple of kids.’ These marines that had to do that were my friends, who I talked to every day. It’s hard knowing that your best friend had to kill innocent people.”
Brobeck started to develop sympathy for the enemy. “A lot of people that shoot back at us aren’t bad people. They’re people who had their wives killed or their sons killed and they’re just trying to get retribution, get revenge and kill the person who killed their son. They’re just innocent people who lost a whole lot and don’t have anything else to do.”
Brobeck was a marine for a year before being deployed to Iraq. “I always heard all these great things that the US military have done throughout history, like great battles that they’ve won. Out of all the forces I knew, the marines were the toughest, most hard core. I wanted to do that. I was willing to risk my life for an actual cause,” he muses, “if there was one.”
What would be a cause worth dying for? “A good cause” is his answer. “But this war doesn’t benefit anyone. It doesn’t benefit Americans, it doesn’t even benefit Iraq. This is not something that anyone should fight and die for. I was only 17 when I signed my contract, and my whole childhood, all I did was play video games and sports. I didn’t pay attention to the news. That stuff was boring to me. But I know first-hand now.”
Last July his unit shipped out without him. “The day I decided to actually leave was sort of a spur-of-the-moment thing. I had wanted to for so long, I just couldn’t bring myself to actually do it, because going Awol is definitely a huge decision, and it’s like throwing away a lot of your life. Plus, I didn’t know what I was going to do if I went Awol.”
The night before leaving, Brobeck confided his intentions to another marine. “He said, ‘You’ve been to Iraq; I haven’t. You have your reasons for going Awol and I’m not going to stop you.’” The departure from the North Carolina base was easy.
“I walked to a bus station and stayed at a hotel that night. The only way I could get home was by bus, and the station was closed. When the Greyhound station opened, I got my ticket and left for Virginia. I was nervous because reveille, the time we wake up, was at 5.30, and they would have definitely noticed I was missing. I thought they would have checked the Greyhound station, the only one near the base. They didn’t, which was good. I didn’t go home to my mom, because I was worried about police being there. I stayed with a friend.”
Twenty-eight days after he went Awol, Brobeck headed for Canada. He discovered the website maintained by the War Resisters Support Campaign, a group of Canadians organising aid for American deserters, and learnt that there would be help from them were he to flee north to Toronto.
He called his mother and together they drove across the Niagara Falls crossing point.
“She doesn’t like the fact that I’m away in Canada and can’t come back to see her,” he says, “but it’s better than me going back to Iraq for a second time.”
Exile in Canada feels good for Brobeck. “Life feels for me, even if I wasn’t Awol, freer up here than it would in America. Everyone is so polite in Canada, friendly.” In the year since he crossed the border, he has met and married his wife, Lisa. His application for refugee status has been denied, but he has hopes of winning his appeal.
“The only thing I left behind was my family and my friends,” he says. “So that’s the only thing I’m going to miss about America – the people.
“The US used to be something you could say you were proud of,” he adds. “You go to another country now and say that you’re an American, you probably won’t get a lot of happy faces or open arms, because of the man in charge. It’s amazing what one person can do. The leadership totally screwed up any respect we had.” His rejection of US policy in Iraq is making him question his sense of national identity. “In my heart I’m not American… if it means I have to conform to what they stand for,” he says about the Bush administration. “I’m not American because America has lost touch with what they were. The founding fathers would definitely be pissed off if they found out what America’s become.”
Mission Rejected, by Peter Laufer, is published in the US by Chelsea Green, and will be published in the UK in January 2007 by John Blake
THE BRITONS WHO ARE SAYING NO
It’s not just Americans: hundreds of our own troops have ‘retreated’ from Iraq. Philip Jacobson reports
Over 2,000 members of Britain’s armed forces have gone long-term Awol since the war in Iraq started, and most are still missing. Before the fighting began, about 375 absconders a year were at large for any length of time, and were dismissed; that figure rose to 720 last year. About 740 men are thought to be on the run still, but have not yet been disciplined.
While the MoD denies that this trend reflects growing opposition to the war, lawyers specialising in court martials report a continuing increase in requests for advice from personnel desperate to avoid being posted to Iraq. Although the overall number of Awol cases has been fairly stable for a few years (about 2,500 annually), there is growing concern in the military about the “Iraq factor”. Before, most absconders were Awol for a relatively short time, typically owing to family or financial problems, or bullying, and either went back to their units voluntarily or were arrested quickly. Most were disciplined by their commanding officers; punishments ranged from demotion to “jankers”, a spell in a military jail.
But it seems that a growing number are ready to risk a charge of desertion — a far more serious offence than going Awol, with penalties to match. According to Gilbert Blades, an expert on military law, the MoD is playing down the true extent of the problem. “It is absolutely clear to me,” he says, “that the crucial factor in driving up Awol levels has been what more and more service people consider to be an illegal conflict.” As Blades sees it, the tightening of the legal definition of desertion in new legislation going through parliament is intended to deter potential absconders. Under the new Armed Forces Bill, people refusing active-service duty in a foreign country could be jailed for life. “It seems obvious this is a direct response to the situation that has developed as the war has intensified,” he says.
Two cases this year have highlighted the issue of morally motivated “refuseniks” in the forces. Ben Griffin, an SAS soldier stationed in Baghdad, told his commanding officer that he was no longer willing to fight alongside “gung-ho and trigger-happy” US troops. Griffin fully expected his eight-year career to end in a court martial and imprisonment, but he was allowed to leave and was given a glowing testimonial to his “strength of character”. Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, an RAF doctor, received eight months in prison for rejecting orders to report for a third tour of duty in Basra on the grounds that the occupation was illegal. He was later freed, but spent the rest of his sentence under house arrest.
An MoD spokeswoman told The Sunday Times Magazine that claims that the level of desertions was rocketing were untrue. “There is a good deal of confusion about this, because people often don’t understand the distinction between deserting and going absent without leave. Only 21 cases of desertion have been recorded over the past five years, and just one person has been convicted of that offence since 1989.” She also said criticism of the new legislation was “misguided and sometimes malicious”. Under the present military legal system, she explained, each arm of the forces administers its own discipline. This no longer reflects an era in which combined operations are becoming common. “It makes sense in the circumstances to have a single law addressing matters of military discipline for all service personnel.” But Blades argues that the clause providing for life sentences in the event of refusal to serve in a foreign combat zone “was driven through solely by the defence establishment to provide a drastic legal remedy to the problem of conscientious objection”. It remains to be seen whether the courts, if pushed, will hand down such a stiff sentence.
Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Rumsfeld From hero to zero
The Decline of Rumsfeld
From hero to zero in just three Woodward books.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2006, at 3:33 PM ET
An interesting exercise, if you have a few hours to spare and a taste for Washington anthropology, is to track the treatment of any major administration figure through the three volumes of Bob Woodward's Bush-the-Warrior trilogy. I spent yesterday reading all the parts about Donald Rumsfeld.
In the first installment, Bush at War, published in 2002, the defense secretary is a hero of Sept. 11 and the triumphant commander of our victory in Afghanistan. As portrayed in B1, Rummy is a seer ("In his early days as defense secretary, Rumsfeld had clearly anticipated that the United States was going to be surprised by some attack, perhaps something along the lines of September 11 … ") and a tower of strength (he "left no doubt in Bush's mind that when the moment came, as it surely would that the United States was threatened, he, as secretary of defense, would be coming to the president to unleash the military"). When the attack he expected finally comes, Rumsfeld has to be pulled off the smoldering wreckage at the Pentagon. He insists on holding an emergency meeting inside the burning building, moving to another office only after Gen. Richard Myers insists, "the smoke is getting pretty bad."
Though one of Woodward's hallmarks is never to tell readers what, or if, he thinks about anything, his adjectives give the game away. On first encounter, Rumsfeld is a "small framed, almost boyish, former Navy fighter pilot who did not look his 69 years." During his first tour as defense secretary under Gerald Ford, Woodward tells us that Rummy was "a JFK from the GOP—handsome, intense, well educated, with an intellectual bent, and an infectious smile." A couple of pages after that, he describes Rumsfeld, in a rare literary reference and with a degree of reverence Woodward reserves for his most gushing sources, as "a walking example of what the novelist Wallace Stegner calls 'resilience under disappointment,' the persistence of drive, hard work and even stubbornness when ambition has not been fully realized."
The anecdotes and quotes in B1 all support the picture of Rummy as a demanding executive with a core of steel. If he is sometimes brusque with subordinates, it's because "Rumsfeld didn't like muddling along. He didn't like imprecision," as Woodward writes. According to the book, George H.W. Bush, his rival in Republican politics in the 1970s, was convinced that Rumsfeld was trying to destroy his political career by getting President Ford to put him in charge of the scandalized CIA. But behind the scenes, Woodward informs us, Rumsfeld strongly objected when Ford promised the Senate that he wouldn't consider his new CIA director, Bush, as a potential running mate in the 1976 election.
In Woodward's second Bush book, Plan of Attack, published in 2004, Rumsfeld retains the sourcely aura, though it's dimming slightly with the failure to recover any WMD in occupied Iraq. Rummy remains "small, almost boyishly dashing," "focused," and "intense." He's still got that infectious smile, though now it can "convey impatience, even condescension" when he is interrogating the sloppy thinking of the bureaucratic midgets who surround him. He can be "tough, unpleasant, unrelenting," but usually in pursuit of "outside the box thinking" in a hidebound and military establishment. "Rumsfeld not only preferred clarity and order. He insisted on them," Woodward tells us, adding in another passage, "The president was focused on the Iraq war plan, and when the president was focused, Rumsfeld was focused." Here is B2's summation following the seemingly successful invasion of Iraq: "Rumsfeld had been the overall manager, the withering interrogator, the defense technocrat who had given the president the plan of attack."
Now we have Woodward's third work in the series, State of Denial. Rumsfeld—embattled and clearly no longer a source for what happens behind the scenes—has misplaced his good looks, his decency, and his brilliance. He still has that "boyish intensity"—Woodward never lets go of an epithet once he's bothered to work it out—but these days he is "cocky" and arrogant, a man whose "micromanaging was almost comic." The story begins with him burying everyone at the Pentagon up to their eyeballs in "snowflakes," unsigned notes that are "an annoyance," "intrusive," and "petty."
B3 Rumsfeld is on a perpetual power-trip, dressing down underlings for the sheer, sadistic pleasure of it. "Shut up," he is recalled to have shouted at some hapless peon decades ago. "I don't want any excuses. You are through and you'll not have time to clean out your desk if this isn't taken care of." Subordinates describe him as "a dick," "that asshole, and "that son of a bitch." Soon after taking office in 2001, he sabotages Vernon Clark, Bush's preferred candidate to run the Joint Chiefs of Staff because Rumsfeld wants a flunky and Clark recognizes the job's statutory obligation to give the president independent advice. Rummy shivs him by telling Bush and Cheney that Clark prefers to stay with the Navy, which isn't true.
By the end of the book, Woodward himself is confronting Rumsfeld over his unwillingness to admit the Iraqi insurgency is growing and that his decisions have cost many lives. "How could he not see his role and responsibility?" Woodward ponders, winding up his interview with the vampire: "I could think of nothing more to say."
State of Denial indeed. One thing more Woodward might say, if he wanted to acknowledge reality himself, is that he has changed his mind about Rumsfeld without Rumsfeld changing one iota. Love him or hate him, Rummy is the Rock of Gibraltar. He will experience personal growth when Dick Cheney turns vegan. But somehow the fixed qualities that Woodward cast as positive in B1 and B2, when all Washington saw Rumsfeld as a hero, have curdled in B3.
In fact, much of the material Woodward uses to damn Rumsfeld comes from the reporting for his earlier, flattering accounts. His three Bush books have grown successively longer (376 pages, 467 pages, and now 560 pages) largely because of the author's habit of recycling his old nuggets, often in the same words, and even in the same place in the narrative. On Page 17 of B3, Woodward microwaves the same flavorless anecdote he served on Page 17 of B2, about Rumsfeld having dinner with Bob in his kitchen in Georgetown. The apparent point—that Rumsfeld has dinner with Bob in his kitchen in Georgetown—remains the same. What's different is the political context.
Woodward never acknowledges changing his mind because he regards himself as a straightforward reporting machine, with no opinions of his own and no axes to grind. He can't say he's revising his judgments because he claims never to have made any. But, of course, Woodward does have a consistent worldview—the conventional wisdom of any given moment. When tout le Beltway viewed Rummy as a commanding hunk, Woodward embodied the adoration. Now that we all know Rummy is a vicious old bastard, Woodward channels the loathing just as fluidly. I'm not holding my breath, but if the war in Iraq takes a turn for the better, Stud Rummy could well return in Woodward's Buns of Brass: Bush at War IV.
What's maddening is the way Woodward reverses his point of view without acknowledging he ever had one—then or now. You could charge him with flattering politicians only when they're up, and piling on when they're down. But you might as well accuse a weathervane of changing its mind about which way the wind should blow.
Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World.
From hero to zero in just three Woodward books.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2006, at 3:33 PM ET
An interesting exercise, if you have a few hours to spare and a taste for Washington anthropology, is to track the treatment of any major administration figure through the three volumes of Bob Woodward's Bush-the-Warrior trilogy. I spent yesterday reading all the parts about Donald Rumsfeld.
In the first installment, Bush at War, published in 2002, the defense secretary is a hero of Sept. 11 and the triumphant commander of our victory in Afghanistan. As portrayed in B1, Rummy is a seer ("In his early days as defense secretary, Rumsfeld had clearly anticipated that the United States was going to be surprised by some attack, perhaps something along the lines of September 11 … ") and a tower of strength (he "left no doubt in Bush's mind that when the moment came, as it surely would that the United States was threatened, he, as secretary of defense, would be coming to the president to unleash the military"). When the attack he expected finally comes, Rumsfeld has to be pulled off the smoldering wreckage at the Pentagon. He insists on holding an emergency meeting inside the burning building, moving to another office only after Gen. Richard Myers insists, "the smoke is getting pretty bad."
Though one of Woodward's hallmarks is never to tell readers what, or if, he thinks about anything, his adjectives give the game away. On first encounter, Rumsfeld is a "small framed, almost boyish, former Navy fighter pilot who did not look his 69 years." During his first tour as defense secretary under Gerald Ford, Woodward tells us that Rummy was "a JFK from the GOP—handsome, intense, well educated, with an intellectual bent, and an infectious smile." A couple of pages after that, he describes Rumsfeld, in a rare literary reference and with a degree of reverence Woodward reserves for his most gushing sources, as "a walking example of what the novelist Wallace Stegner calls 'resilience under disappointment,' the persistence of drive, hard work and even stubbornness when ambition has not been fully realized."
The anecdotes and quotes in B1 all support the picture of Rummy as a demanding executive with a core of steel. If he is sometimes brusque with subordinates, it's because "Rumsfeld didn't like muddling along. He didn't like imprecision," as Woodward writes. According to the book, George H.W. Bush, his rival in Republican politics in the 1970s, was convinced that Rumsfeld was trying to destroy his political career by getting President Ford to put him in charge of the scandalized CIA. But behind the scenes, Woodward informs us, Rumsfeld strongly objected when Ford promised the Senate that he wouldn't consider his new CIA director, Bush, as a potential running mate in the 1976 election.
In Woodward's second Bush book, Plan of Attack, published in 2004, Rumsfeld retains the sourcely aura, though it's dimming slightly with the failure to recover any WMD in occupied Iraq. Rummy remains "small, almost boyishly dashing," "focused," and "intense." He's still got that infectious smile, though now it can "convey impatience, even condescension" when he is interrogating the sloppy thinking of the bureaucratic midgets who surround him. He can be "tough, unpleasant, unrelenting," but usually in pursuit of "outside the box thinking" in a hidebound and military establishment. "Rumsfeld not only preferred clarity and order. He insisted on them," Woodward tells us, adding in another passage, "The president was focused on the Iraq war plan, and when the president was focused, Rumsfeld was focused." Here is B2's summation following the seemingly successful invasion of Iraq: "Rumsfeld had been the overall manager, the withering interrogator, the defense technocrat who had given the president the plan of attack."
Now we have Woodward's third work in the series, State of Denial. Rumsfeld—embattled and clearly no longer a source for what happens behind the scenes—has misplaced his good looks, his decency, and his brilliance. He still has that "boyish intensity"—Woodward never lets go of an epithet once he's bothered to work it out—but these days he is "cocky" and arrogant, a man whose "micromanaging was almost comic." The story begins with him burying everyone at the Pentagon up to their eyeballs in "snowflakes," unsigned notes that are "an annoyance," "intrusive," and "petty."
B3 Rumsfeld is on a perpetual power-trip, dressing down underlings for the sheer, sadistic pleasure of it. "Shut up," he is recalled to have shouted at some hapless peon decades ago. "I don't want any excuses. You are through and you'll not have time to clean out your desk if this isn't taken care of." Subordinates describe him as "a dick," "that asshole, and "that son of a bitch." Soon after taking office in 2001, he sabotages Vernon Clark, Bush's preferred candidate to run the Joint Chiefs of Staff because Rumsfeld wants a flunky and Clark recognizes the job's statutory obligation to give the president independent advice. Rummy shivs him by telling Bush and Cheney that Clark prefers to stay with the Navy, which isn't true.
By the end of the book, Woodward himself is confronting Rumsfeld over his unwillingness to admit the Iraqi insurgency is growing and that his decisions have cost many lives. "How could he not see his role and responsibility?" Woodward ponders, winding up his interview with the vampire: "I could think of nothing more to say."
State of Denial indeed. One thing more Woodward might say, if he wanted to acknowledge reality himself, is that he has changed his mind about Rumsfeld without Rumsfeld changing one iota. Love him or hate him, Rummy is the Rock of Gibraltar. He will experience personal growth when Dick Cheney turns vegan. But somehow the fixed qualities that Woodward cast as positive in B1 and B2, when all Washington saw Rumsfeld as a hero, have curdled in B3.
In fact, much of the material Woodward uses to damn Rumsfeld comes from the reporting for his earlier, flattering accounts. His three Bush books have grown successively longer (376 pages, 467 pages, and now 560 pages) largely because of the author's habit of recycling his old nuggets, often in the same words, and even in the same place in the narrative. On Page 17 of B3, Woodward microwaves the same flavorless anecdote he served on Page 17 of B2, about Rumsfeld having dinner with Bob in his kitchen in Georgetown. The apparent point—that Rumsfeld has dinner with Bob in his kitchen in Georgetown—remains the same. What's different is the political context.
Woodward never acknowledges changing his mind because he regards himself as a straightforward reporting machine, with no opinions of his own and no axes to grind. He can't say he's revising his judgments because he claims never to have made any. But, of course, Woodward does have a consistent worldview—the conventional wisdom of any given moment. When tout le Beltway viewed Rummy as a commanding hunk, Woodward embodied the adoration. Now that we all know Rummy is a vicious old bastard, Woodward channels the loathing just as fluidly. I'm not holding my breath, but if the war in Iraq takes a turn for the better, Stud Rummy could well return in Woodward's Buns of Brass: Bush at War IV.
What's maddening is the way Woodward reverses his point of view without acknowledging he ever had one—then or now. You could charge him with flattering politicians only when they're up, and piling on when they're down. But you might as well accuse a weathervane of changing its mind about which way the wind should blow.
Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Secret Reports Dispute White House Optimism
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
10/01/06 "Washington Post" -- -- On May 22, 2006, President Bush spoke in Chicago and gave a characteristically upbeat forecast: "Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as a decisive moment in the story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the Middle East and the forces of terror began their long retreat."
Two days later, the intelligence division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret intelligence assessment to the White House that contradicted the president's forecast.
Instead of a "long retreat," the report forecast a more violent 2007: "Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year."
A graph included in the assessment measured attacks from May 2003 to May 2006. It showed some significant dips, but the current number of attacks against U.S.-led coalition forces and Iraqi authorities was as high as it had ever been -- exceeding 3,500 a month. [In July the number would be over 4,500.] The assessment also included a pessimistic report on crude oil production, the delivery of electricity and political progress.
On May 26, the Pentagon released an unclassified report to Congress, required by law, that contradicted the Joint Chiefs' secret assessment. The public report sent to Congress said the "appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007."
There was a vast difference between what the White House and Pentagon knew about the situation in Iraq and what they were saying publicly. But the discrepancy was not surprising. In memos, reports and internal debates, high-level officials of the Bush administration have voiced their concern about the United States' ability to bring peace and stability to Iraq since early in the occupation.
[The release last week of portions of a National Intelligence Estimate concluding that the war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for terrorists -- following a series of upbeat speeches by the president -- presented a similar contrast.]
On June 18, 2003, Jay Garner went to see Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to report on his brief tenure in Iraq as head of the postwar planning office. Throughout the invasion and the early days of the war, Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general, had struggled just to get his team into Iraq. Two days after he arrived, Rumsfeld called to tell him that L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, a 61-year-old terrorism expert and protege of Henry A. Kissinger, would be coming over as the presidential envoy, effectively replacing Garner.
"We've made three tragic decisions," Garner told Rumsfeld.
"Really?" Rumsfeld asked.
"Three terrible mistakes," Garner said.
He cited the first two orders Bremer signed when he arrived, the first one banning as many as 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from government jobs and the second disbanding the Iraqi military. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganized, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around.
Third, Garner said, Bremer had summarily dismissed an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term. "Jerry Bremer can't be the face of the government to the Iraqi people. You've got to have an Iraqi face for the Iraqi people."
Garner made his final point: "There's still time to rectify this. There's still time to turn it around."
Rumsfeld looked at Garner for a moment with his take-no-prisoners gaze. "Well," he said, "I don't think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are."
He thinks I've lost it, Garner thought. He thinks I'm absolutely wrong. Garner didn't want it to sound like sour grapes, but facts were facts. "They're all reversible," Garner said again.
"We're not going to go back," Rumsfeld said emphatically.
Later that day, Garner went with Rumsfeld to the White House. But in a meeting with Bush, he made no mention of mistakes. Instead he regaled the president with stories from his time in Baghdad.
In an interview last December, I asked Garner if he had any regrets in not telling the president about his misgivings.
"You know, I don't know if I had that moment to live over again, I don't know if I'd do that or not. But if I had done that -- and quite frankly, I mean, I wouldn't have had a problem doing that -- but in my thinking, the door's closed. I mean, there's nothing I can do to open this door again. And I think if I had said that to the president in front of Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld in there, the president would have looked at them and they would have rolled their eyes back and he would have thought, 'Boy, I wonder why we didn't get rid of this guy sooner?' "
"They didn't see it coming," Garner added. "As the troops said, they drank the Kool-Aid."
What's the Strategy?
In the fall of 2003 and the winter of 2004, officials of the National Security Council became increasingly concerned about the ability of the U.S. military to counter the growing insurgency in Iraq.
Returning from a visit to Iraq, Robert D. Blackwill, the NSC's top official for Iraq, was deeply disturbed by what he considered the inadequate number of troops on the ground there. He told Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, that the NSC needed to do a military review.
"If we have a military strategy, I can't identify it," Hadley said. "I don't know what's worse -- that they have one and won't tell us or that they don't have one."
Rice had made it clear that her authority did not extend to Rumsfeld or the military, so Blackwill never forced the issue with her. Still, he wondered why the president never challenged the military. Why didn't he say to Gen. John P. Abizaid at the end of one of his secure video briefings, "John, let's have another of these on Thursday and what I really want from you is please explain to me, let's take an hour and a half, your military strategy for victory."
After Bush's reelection, Hadley replaced Rice as national security adviser. He made an assessment of the problems from the first term.
"I give us a B-minus for policy development," he told a colleague on Feb. 5, 2005, "and a D-minus for policy execution."
Rice, for her part, hired Philip D. Zelikow, an old friend, and sent him immediately to Iraq. She needed ground truth, a full, detailed report from someone she trusted. Zelikow had a license to go anywhere and ask any question.
On Feb. 10, 2005, two weeks after Rice became secretary of state, Zelikow presented her with a 15-page, single-spaced secret memo. "At this point Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change," Zelikow wrote.
The insurgency was "being contained militarily," but it was "quite active," leaving Iraqi civilians feeling "very insecure," Zelikow said.
U.S. officials seemed locked down in the fortified Green Zone. "Mobility of coalition officials is extremely limited, and productive government activity is constrained."
Zelikow criticized the Baghdad-centered effort, noting that "the war can certainly be lost in Baghdad, but the war can only be won in the cities and provinces outside Baghdad."
In sum, he said, the United States' effort suffered because it lacked an articulated, comprehensive, unified policy.
Lessons From Kissinger
A powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush's Iraq policy was former secretary of state Kissinger.
"Of the outside people that I talk to in this job," Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, "I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter [his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby] and I sit down with him."
The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.
Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw it through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.
In his writing, speeches and private comments, Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress.
In a column in The Washington Post on Aug. 12, 2005, titled "Lessons for an Exit Strategy," Kissinger wrote, "Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy."
He delivered the same message directly to Bush, Cheney and Hadley at the White House.
Victory had to be the goal, he told all. Don't let it happen again. Don't give an inch, or else the media, the Congress and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back.
He also said that the eventual outcome in Iraq was more important than Vietnam had been. A radical Islamic or Taliban-style government in Iraq would be a model that could challenge the internal stability of the key countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Kissinger told Rice that in Vietnam they didn't have the time, focus, energy or support at home to get the politics in place. That's why it had collapsed like a house of cards. He urged that the Bush administration get the politics right, both in Iraq and on the home front. Partially withdrawing troops had its own dangers. Even entertaining the idea of withdrawing any troops could create momentum for an exit that was less than victory.
In a meeting with presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson in early September 2005, Kissinger was more explicit: Bush needed to resist the pressure to withdraw American troops. He repeated his axiom that the only meaningful exit strategy was victory.
"The president can't be talking about troop reductions as a centerpiece," Kissinger said. "You may want to reduce troops," but troop reduction should not be the objective. "This is not where you put the emphasis."
To emphasize his point, he gave Gerson a copy of a memo he had written to President Richard M. Nixon, dated Sept. 10, 1969.
"Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded," he wrote.
The policy of "Vietnamization," turning the fight over to the South Vietnamese military, Kissinger wrote, might increase pressure to end the war because the American public wanted a quick resolution. Troop withdrawals would only encourage the enemy. "It will become harder and harder to maintain the morale of those who remain, not to speak of their mothers."
Two months after Gerson's meeting, the administration issued a 35-page "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq." It was right out of the Kissinger playbook. The only meaningful exit strategy would be victory.
Echoes of Vietnam
Vietnam was also on the minds of some old Army buddies of Gen. Abizaid, the Centcom commander. They were worried that Iraq was slowly turning into Vietnam -- either it would wind down prematurely or become a war that was not winnable.
Some of them, including retired Gen. Wayne A. Downing and James V. Kimsey, a founder of America Online, visited Abizaid in 2005 at his headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and then in Iraq.
Abizaid held to the position that the war was now about the Iraqis. They had to win it now. The U.S. military had done all it could. It was critical, he argued, that they lower the American troop presence. It was still the face of an occupation, with American forces patrolling, kicking down doors and looking at the Iraqi women, which infuriated the Iraqi men.
"We've got to get the [expletive] out," he said.
Abizaid's old friends were worried sick that another Vietnam or anything that looked like Vietnam would be the end of the volunteer army. What's the strategy for winning? they pressed him.
"That's not my job," Abizaid said.
No, it is part of your job, they insisted.
No, Abizaid said. Articulating strategy belonged to others.
Who?
"The president and Condi Rice, because Rumsfeld doesn't have any credibility anymore," he said.
This March, Abizaid was in Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He painted a careful but upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq.
Afterward, he went over to see Rep. John P. Murtha in the Rayburn House Office Building. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, had introduced a resolution in Congress calling for American troops in Iraq to be "redeployed" -- the military term for returning troops overseas to their home bases -- "at the earliest practicable date."
"The war in Iraq is not going as advertised," Murtha had said. "It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion."
Now, sitting at the round dark-wood table in the congressman's office, Abizaid, the one uniformed military commander who had been intimately involved in Iraq from the beginning and who was still at it, indicated he wanted to speak frankly. According to Murtha, Abizaid raised his hand for emphasis, held his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch from each other and said, "We're that far apart."
Frustration and a Resignation
That same month, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. prepared to leave the administration after submitting his resignation to Bush. He felt a sense of relief mixed with the knowledge that he was leaving unfinished business.
"It's Iraq, Iraq, Iraq," Card had told his replacement, Joshua B. Bolten. "Then comes the economy."
One of Card's great worries was that Iraq would be compared to Vietnam. In March, there were 58,249 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. One of Kissinger's private criticisms of Bush was that he had no mechanism in place, or even an inclination, to consider the downsides of impending decisions. Alternative courses of action were rarely considered.
As best as Card could remember, there had been some informal, blue-sky discussions at times along the lines of "What could we do differently?" But there had been no formal sessions to consider alternatives to staying in Iraq. To his knowledge there were no anguished memos bearing the names of Cheney, Rice, Hadley, Rumsfeld, the CIA, Card himself or anyone else saying "Let's examine alternatives," as had surfaced after the Vietnam era.
Card put it on the generals in the Pentagon and Iraq. If they had come forward and said to the president, "It's not worth it," or, "The mission can't be accomplished," Card was certain, the president would have said "I'm not going to ask another kid to sacrifice for it."
Card was enough of a realist to see that there were two negative aspects to Bush's public persona that had come to define his presidency: incompetence and arrogance. Card did not believe that Bush was incompetent, and so he had to face the possibility that, as Bush's chief of staff, he might have been the incompetent one. In addition, he did not think the president was arrogant.
But the marketing of Bush had come across as arrogant. Maybe it was unfair in Card's opinion, but there it was.
He was leaving. And the man he considered most responsible for the postwar troubles, the one who should have gone, Rumsfeld, was staying.
Bill Murphy Jr. and Christine Parthemore contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
شبكة البصرة
الاثنين 10 رمضان 1427 / 2 تشرين الاول 2006
يرجى الاشارة الى شبكة البصرة عند اعادة النشر او الاقتباس
Washington Post Staff Writer
10/01/06 "Washington Post" -- -- On May 22, 2006, President Bush spoke in Chicago and gave a characteristically upbeat forecast: "Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as a decisive moment in the story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the Middle East and the forces of terror began their long retreat."
Two days later, the intelligence division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret intelligence assessment to the White House that contradicted the president's forecast.
Instead of a "long retreat," the report forecast a more violent 2007: "Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year."
A graph included in the assessment measured attacks from May 2003 to May 2006. It showed some significant dips, but the current number of attacks against U.S.-led coalition forces and Iraqi authorities was as high as it had ever been -- exceeding 3,500 a month. [In July the number would be over 4,500.] The assessment also included a pessimistic report on crude oil production, the delivery of electricity and political progress.
On May 26, the Pentagon released an unclassified report to Congress, required by law, that contradicted the Joint Chiefs' secret assessment. The public report sent to Congress said the "appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007."
There was a vast difference between what the White House and Pentagon knew about the situation in Iraq and what they were saying publicly. But the discrepancy was not surprising. In memos, reports and internal debates, high-level officials of the Bush administration have voiced their concern about the United States' ability to bring peace and stability to Iraq since early in the occupation.
[The release last week of portions of a National Intelligence Estimate concluding that the war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for terrorists -- following a series of upbeat speeches by the president -- presented a similar contrast.]
On June 18, 2003, Jay Garner went to see Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to report on his brief tenure in Iraq as head of the postwar planning office. Throughout the invasion and the early days of the war, Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general, had struggled just to get his team into Iraq. Two days after he arrived, Rumsfeld called to tell him that L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, a 61-year-old terrorism expert and protege of Henry A. Kissinger, would be coming over as the presidential envoy, effectively replacing Garner.
"We've made three tragic decisions," Garner told Rumsfeld.
"Really?" Rumsfeld asked.
"Three terrible mistakes," Garner said.
He cited the first two orders Bremer signed when he arrived, the first one banning as many as 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from government jobs and the second disbanding the Iraqi military. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganized, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around.
Third, Garner said, Bremer had summarily dismissed an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term. "Jerry Bremer can't be the face of the government to the Iraqi people. You've got to have an Iraqi face for the Iraqi people."
Garner made his final point: "There's still time to rectify this. There's still time to turn it around."
Rumsfeld looked at Garner for a moment with his take-no-prisoners gaze. "Well," he said, "I don't think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are."
He thinks I've lost it, Garner thought. He thinks I'm absolutely wrong. Garner didn't want it to sound like sour grapes, but facts were facts. "They're all reversible," Garner said again.
"We're not going to go back," Rumsfeld said emphatically.
Later that day, Garner went with Rumsfeld to the White House. But in a meeting with Bush, he made no mention of mistakes. Instead he regaled the president with stories from his time in Baghdad.
In an interview last December, I asked Garner if he had any regrets in not telling the president about his misgivings.
"You know, I don't know if I had that moment to live over again, I don't know if I'd do that or not. But if I had done that -- and quite frankly, I mean, I wouldn't have had a problem doing that -- but in my thinking, the door's closed. I mean, there's nothing I can do to open this door again. And I think if I had said that to the president in front of Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld in there, the president would have looked at them and they would have rolled their eyes back and he would have thought, 'Boy, I wonder why we didn't get rid of this guy sooner?' "
"They didn't see it coming," Garner added. "As the troops said, they drank the Kool-Aid."
What's the Strategy?
In the fall of 2003 and the winter of 2004, officials of the National Security Council became increasingly concerned about the ability of the U.S. military to counter the growing insurgency in Iraq.
Returning from a visit to Iraq, Robert D. Blackwill, the NSC's top official for Iraq, was deeply disturbed by what he considered the inadequate number of troops on the ground there. He told Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, that the NSC needed to do a military review.
"If we have a military strategy, I can't identify it," Hadley said. "I don't know what's worse -- that they have one and won't tell us or that they don't have one."
Rice had made it clear that her authority did not extend to Rumsfeld or the military, so Blackwill never forced the issue with her. Still, he wondered why the president never challenged the military. Why didn't he say to Gen. John P. Abizaid at the end of one of his secure video briefings, "John, let's have another of these on Thursday and what I really want from you is please explain to me, let's take an hour and a half, your military strategy for victory."
After Bush's reelection, Hadley replaced Rice as national security adviser. He made an assessment of the problems from the first term.
"I give us a B-minus for policy development," he told a colleague on Feb. 5, 2005, "and a D-minus for policy execution."
Rice, for her part, hired Philip D. Zelikow, an old friend, and sent him immediately to Iraq. She needed ground truth, a full, detailed report from someone she trusted. Zelikow had a license to go anywhere and ask any question.
On Feb. 10, 2005, two weeks after Rice became secretary of state, Zelikow presented her with a 15-page, single-spaced secret memo. "At this point Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change," Zelikow wrote.
The insurgency was "being contained militarily," but it was "quite active," leaving Iraqi civilians feeling "very insecure," Zelikow said.
U.S. officials seemed locked down in the fortified Green Zone. "Mobility of coalition officials is extremely limited, and productive government activity is constrained."
Zelikow criticized the Baghdad-centered effort, noting that "the war can certainly be lost in Baghdad, but the war can only be won in the cities and provinces outside Baghdad."
In sum, he said, the United States' effort suffered because it lacked an articulated, comprehensive, unified policy.
Lessons From Kissinger
A powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush's Iraq policy was former secretary of state Kissinger.
"Of the outside people that I talk to in this job," Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, "I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter [his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby] and I sit down with him."
The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.
Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw it through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.
In his writing, speeches and private comments, Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress.
In a column in The Washington Post on Aug. 12, 2005, titled "Lessons for an Exit Strategy," Kissinger wrote, "Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy."
He delivered the same message directly to Bush, Cheney and Hadley at the White House.
Victory had to be the goal, he told all. Don't let it happen again. Don't give an inch, or else the media, the Congress and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back.
He also said that the eventual outcome in Iraq was more important than Vietnam had been. A radical Islamic or Taliban-style government in Iraq would be a model that could challenge the internal stability of the key countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Kissinger told Rice that in Vietnam they didn't have the time, focus, energy or support at home to get the politics in place. That's why it had collapsed like a house of cards. He urged that the Bush administration get the politics right, both in Iraq and on the home front. Partially withdrawing troops had its own dangers. Even entertaining the idea of withdrawing any troops could create momentum for an exit that was less than victory.
In a meeting with presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson in early September 2005, Kissinger was more explicit: Bush needed to resist the pressure to withdraw American troops. He repeated his axiom that the only meaningful exit strategy was victory.
"The president can't be talking about troop reductions as a centerpiece," Kissinger said. "You may want to reduce troops," but troop reduction should not be the objective. "This is not where you put the emphasis."
To emphasize his point, he gave Gerson a copy of a memo he had written to President Richard M. Nixon, dated Sept. 10, 1969.
"Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded," he wrote.
The policy of "Vietnamization," turning the fight over to the South Vietnamese military, Kissinger wrote, might increase pressure to end the war because the American public wanted a quick resolution. Troop withdrawals would only encourage the enemy. "It will become harder and harder to maintain the morale of those who remain, not to speak of their mothers."
Two months after Gerson's meeting, the administration issued a 35-page "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq." It was right out of the Kissinger playbook. The only meaningful exit strategy would be victory.
Echoes of Vietnam
Vietnam was also on the minds of some old Army buddies of Gen. Abizaid, the Centcom commander. They were worried that Iraq was slowly turning into Vietnam -- either it would wind down prematurely or become a war that was not winnable.
Some of them, including retired Gen. Wayne A. Downing and James V. Kimsey, a founder of America Online, visited Abizaid in 2005 at his headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and then in Iraq.
Abizaid held to the position that the war was now about the Iraqis. They had to win it now. The U.S. military had done all it could. It was critical, he argued, that they lower the American troop presence. It was still the face of an occupation, with American forces patrolling, kicking down doors and looking at the Iraqi women, which infuriated the Iraqi men.
"We've got to get the [expletive] out," he said.
Abizaid's old friends were worried sick that another Vietnam or anything that looked like Vietnam would be the end of the volunteer army. What's the strategy for winning? they pressed him.
"That's not my job," Abizaid said.
No, it is part of your job, they insisted.
No, Abizaid said. Articulating strategy belonged to others.
Who?
"The president and Condi Rice, because Rumsfeld doesn't have any credibility anymore," he said.
This March, Abizaid was in Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He painted a careful but upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq.
Afterward, he went over to see Rep. John P. Murtha in the Rayburn House Office Building. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, had introduced a resolution in Congress calling for American troops in Iraq to be "redeployed" -- the military term for returning troops overseas to their home bases -- "at the earliest practicable date."
"The war in Iraq is not going as advertised," Murtha had said. "It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion."
Now, sitting at the round dark-wood table in the congressman's office, Abizaid, the one uniformed military commander who had been intimately involved in Iraq from the beginning and who was still at it, indicated he wanted to speak frankly. According to Murtha, Abizaid raised his hand for emphasis, held his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch from each other and said, "We're that far apart."
Frustration and a Resignation
That same month, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. prepared to leave the administration after submitting his resignation to Bush. He felt a sense of relief mixed with the knowledge that he was leaving unfinished business.
"It's Iraq, Iraq, Iraq," Card had told his replacement, Joshua B. Bolten. "Then comes the economy."
One of Card's great worries was that Iraq would be compared to Vietnam. In March, there were 58,249 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. One of Kissinger's private criticisms of Bush was that he had no mechanism in place, or even an inclination, to consider the downsides of impending decisions. Alternative courses of action were rarely considered.
As best as Card could remember, there had been some informal, blue-sky discussions at times along the lines of "What could we do differently?" But there had been no formal sessions to consider alternatives to staying in Iraq. To his knowledge there were no anguished memos bearing the names of Cheney, Rice, Hadley, Rumsfeld, the CIA, Card himself or anyone else saying "Let's examine alternatives," as had surfaced after the Vietnam era.
Card put it on the generals in the Pentagon and Iraq. If they had come forward and said to the president, "It's not worth it," or, "The mission can't be accomplished," Card was certain, the president would have said "I'm not going to ask another kid to sacrifice for it."
Card was enough of a realist to see that there were two negative aspects to Bush's public persona that had come to define his presidency: incompetence and arrogance. Card did not believe that Bush was incompetent, and so he had to face the possibility that, as Bush's chief of staff, he might have been the incompetent one. In addition, he did not think the president was arrogant.
But the marketing of Bush had come across as arrogant. Maybe it was unfair in Card's opinion, but there it was.
He was leaving. And the man he considered most responsible for the postwar troubles, the one who should have gone, Rumsfeld, was staying.
Bill Murphy Jr. and Christine Parthemore contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
شبكة البصرة
الاثنين 10 رمضان 1427 / 2 تشرين الاول 2006
يرجى الاشارة الى شبكة البصرة عند اعادة النشر او الاقتباس
Monday, October 02, 2006
Full text: US intelligence findings
Wednesday 27 September 2006 6:15 AM GMT
Jihadist groups have carried out a number of attacks in Iraq
The full text of the parts of the US National Intelligence Estimate report declassified on Tuesday.
The document was written in April, before the death of al-Qaeda in Iraq leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qaeda and disrupted its operations; however, we judge that al-Qaeda will continue to pose the greatest threat by a single terrorist organization to the homeland and US interests abroad.
We also assess that the global jihadist movement, which includes al-Qaeda, affiliated and independent terrorist groups and emerging networks and cells, is spreading and adapting to counterterrorism efforts.
Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with precision, a large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in number and geographic dispersion.
If this trend continues, threats to US interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide.
Dispersed groups
Greater pluralism and more responsive political systems in Muslim-majority nations would alleviate some of the grievances jihadists exploit.
Over time, such progress, together with sustained, multifaceted programmes aimed at the vulnerabilities of the jihadist movement and continued pressure on al-Qaeda, could erode support for the jihadists.
We assess that the global jihadist movement is decentralised, lacks a coherent global strategy and is becoming more diffuse.
New jihadist networks and cells, with anti-American agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge.
The confluence of shared purpose and dispersed actors will make it harder to find and undermine jihadist groups.
We assess that the operational threat from self-radicalised cells will grow in importance to US counterterrorism efforts, particularly abroad but also in the homeland.
Iraq impact
The jihadists regard Europe as an important venue for attacking Western interests.
Extremist networks inside the extensive Muslim diasporas in Europe facilitate recruitment and staging for urban attacks, as illustrated by the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London bombings.
We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.
The Iraq conflict has become the "cause celebre" for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world, and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.
Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.
Unpopular politics
We assess that the underlying factors fuelling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities and are likely to do so for the duration of the timeframe of this estimate.
Four underlying factors are fuelling the spread of the jihadist movement:
1. Entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation and a sense of powerlessness.
2. The Iraq jihad.
3. The slow pace of real and sustained economic, social and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations.
4. Pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims, all of which jihadists exploit.
Concomitant vulnerabilities in the jihadist movement have emerged that, if fully exposed and exploited, could begin to slow the spread of the movement.
They include dependence on the continuation of Muslim-related conflicts, the limited appeal of the jihadists' radical ideology, the emergence of respected voices of moderation and criticism of the violent tactics employed against mostly Muslim citizens.
The jihadists' greatest vulnerability is that their ultimate political solution - an ultraconservative interpretation of Shariah-based governance spanning the Muslim world - is unpopular with the vast majority of Muslims.
Exposing the religious and political straitjacket that is implied by the jihadists' propaganda would help to divide them from the audiences they seek to persuade.
Recent condemnations of violence and extremist religious interpretations by a few notable Muslim clerics signal a trend that could facilitate the growth of a constructive alternative to jihadist ideology: peaceful political activism.
This also could lead to the consistent and dynamic participation of broader Muslim communities in rejecting violence, reducing the ability of radicals to capitalize on passive community support.
In this way, the Muslim mainstream emerges as the most powerful weapon in the war on terror.
Al-Zarqawi
Countering the spread of the jihadist movement will require co-ordinated multilateral efforts that go well beyond operations to capture or kill terrorist leaders.
If democratic reform efforts in Muslim-majority nations progress over the next five years, political participation probably would drive a wedge between intransigent extremists and groups willing to use the political process to achieve their local objectives.
Nonetheless, attendant reforms and potentially destabilizing transitions will create new opportunities for jihadists to exploit.
Al-Qaeda, now merged with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's network, is exploiting the situation in Iraq to attract new recruits and donors and to maintain its leadership role.
The loss of main leaders, particularly Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and al-Zarqawi, in rapid succession, probably would cause the group to fracture into smaller groups.
Although like-minded individuals would endeavor to carry on the mission, the loss of these main leaders would exacerbate
strains and disagreements.
We assess that the resulting splinter groups would, at least for a time, pose a less serious threat to US interests than does al-Qaeda.
Should al-Zarqawi continue to evade capture and scale back attacks against Muslims, we assess he could broaden his popular appeal and present a global threat.
The increased role of Iraqis in managing the operations of al-Qaeda in Iraq might lead veteran foreign jihadists to focus their efforts on external operations.
Other affiliated Sunni-extremist organizations, such as Jemaah Islamiya, Ansar al-Sunnah and several North African groups, unless countered, are likely to expand their reach and become more capable of multiple and/or mass-casualty attacks outside their traditional areas of operation.
Wider concern
We assess that such groups pose less of a danger to the homeland than does al-Qaeda, but will pose varying degrees of threat to our allies and to US interests abroad.
The focus of their attacks is likely to ebb and flow between local regime targets and regional or global ones.
We judge that most jihadist groups - both well-known and newly formed - will use improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks, focused primarily on soft targets, to implement their asymmetric warfare strategy, and that they will attempt to conduct sustained terrorist attacks in urban environments.
Fighters with experience in Iraq are a potential source of leadership for jihadists pursuing these tactics.
(Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapon) capabilities will continue to be sought by jihadist groups.
While Iran, and to a lesser extent Syria, remain the most active state sponsors of terrorism, many other states will be unable to prevent territory or resources from being exploited by terrorists.
Anti-US and anti-globalisation sentiment is on the rise and fuelling other radical ideologies.
This could prompt some leftist, nationalist or separatist groups to adopt terrorist methods to attack US interests.
The radicalization process is occurring more quickly, more widely, and more anonymously in the internet age, raising the likelihood of surprise attacks by unknown groups whose members and supporters may be difficult to pinpoint.
We judge that groups of all stripes will increasingly use the internet to communicate, propagandise, recruit, train and obtain logistical and financial support.
AP
By
You can find this article at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/96B66353-9F35-4685-B6F9-5DF1F25A1C35.htm
Jihadist groups have carried out a number of attacks in Iraq
The full text of the parts of the US National Intelligence Estimate report declassified on Tuesday.
The document was written in April, before the death of al-Qaeda in Iraq leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qaeda and disrupted its operations; however, we judge that al-Qaeda will continue to pose the greatest threat by a single terrorist organization to the homeland and US interests abroad.
We also assess that the global jihadist movement, which includes al-Qaeda, affiliated and independent terrorist groups and emerging networks and cells, is spreading and adapting to counterterrorism efforts.
Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with precision, a large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in number and geographic dispersion.
If this trend continues, threats to US interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide.
Dispersed groups
Greater pluralism and more responsive political systems in Muslim-majority nations would alleviate some of the grievances jihadists exploit.
Over time, such progress, together with sustained, multifaceted programmes aimed at the vulnerabilities of the jihadist movement and continued pressure on al-Qaeda, could erode support for the jihadists.
We assess that the global jihadist movement is decentralised, lacks a coherent global strategy and is becoming more diffuse.
New jihadist networks and cells, with anti-American agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge.
The confluence of shared purpose and dispersed actors will make it harder to find and undermine jihadist groups.
We assess that the operational threat from self-radicalised cells will grow in importance to US counterterrorism efforts, particularly abroad but also in the homeland.
Iraq impact
The jihadists regard Europe as an important venue for attacking Western interests.
Extremist networks inside the extensive Muslim diasporas in Europe facilitate recruitment and staging for urban attacks, as illustrated by the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London bombings.
We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.
The Iraq conflict has become the "cause celebre" for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world, and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.
Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.
Unpopular politics
We assess that the underlying factors fuelling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities and are likely to do so for the duration of the timeframe of this estimate.
Four underlying factors are fuelling the spread of the jihadist movement:
1. Entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation and a sense of powerlessness.
2. The Iraq jihad.
3. The slow pace of real and sustained economic, social and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations.
4. Pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims, all of which jihadists exploit.
Concomitant vulnerabilities in the jihadist movement have emerged that, if fully exposed and exploited, could begin to slow the spread of the movement.
They include dependence on the continuation of Muslim-related conflicts, the limited appeal of the jihadists' radical ideology, the emergence of respected voices of moderation and criticism of the violent tactics employed against mostly Muslim citizens.
The jihadists' greatest vulnerability is that their ultimate political solution - an ultraconservative interpretation of Shariah-based governance spanning the Muslim world - is unpopular with the vast majority of Muslims.
Exposing the religious and political straitjacket that is implied by the jihadists' propaganda would help to divide them from the audiences they seek to persuade.
Recent condemnations of violence and extremist religious interpretations by a few notable Muslim clerics signal a trend that could facilitate the growth of a constructive alternative to jihadist ideology: peaceful political activism.
This also could lead to the consistent and dynamic participation of broader Muslim communities in rejecting violence, reducing the ability of radicals to capitalize on passive community support.
In this way, the Muslim mainstream emerges as the most powerful weapon in the war on terror.
Al-Zarqawi
Countering the spread of the jihadist movement will require co-ordinated multilateral efforts that go well beyond operations to capture or kill terrorist leaders.
If democratic reform efforts in Muslim-majority nations progress over the next five years, political participation probably would drive a wedge between intransigent extremists and groups willing to use the political process to achieve their local objectives.
Nonetheless, attendant reforms and potentially destabilizing transitions will create new opportunities for jihadists to exploit.
Al-Qaeda, now merged with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's network, is exploiting the situation in Iraq to attract new recruits and donors and to maintain its leadership role.
The loss of main leaders, particularly Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and al-Zarqawi, in rapid succession, probably would cause the group to fracture into smaller groups.
Although like-minded individuals would endeavor to carry on the mission, the loss of these main leaders would exacerbate
strains and disagreements.
We assess that the resulting splinter groups would, at least for a time, pose a less serious threat to US interests than does al-Qaeda.
Should al-Zarqawi continue to evade capture and scale back attacks against Muslims, we assess he could broaden his popular appeal and present a global threat.
The increased role of Iraqis in managing the operations of al-Qaeda in Iraq might lead veteran foreign jihadists to focus their efforts on external operations.
Other affiliated Sunni-extremist organizations, such as Jemaah Islamiya, Ansar al-Sunnah and several North African groups, unless countered, are likely to expand their reach and become more capable of multiple and/or mass-casualty attacks outside their traditional areas of operation.
Wider concern
We assess that such groups pose less of a danger to the homeland than does al-Qaeda, but will pose varying degrees of threat to our allies and to US interests abroad.
The focus of their attacks is likely to ebb and flow between local regime targets and regional or global ones.
We judge that most jihadist groups - both well-known and newly formed - will use improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks, focused primarily on soft targets, to implement their asymmetric warfare strategy, and that they will attempt to conduct sustained terrorist attacks in urban environments.
Fighters with experience in Iraq are a potential source of leadership for jihadists pursuing these tactics.
(Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapon) capabilities will continue to be sought by jihadist groups.
While Iran, and to a lesser extent Syria, remain the most active state sponsors of terrorism, many other states will be unable to prevent territory or resources from being exploited by terrorists.
Anti-US and anti-globalisation sentiment is on the rise and fuelling other radical ideologies.
This could prompt some leftist, nationalist or separatist groups to adopt terrorist methods to attack US interests.
The radicalization process is occurring more quickly, more widely, and more anonymously in the internet age, raising the likelihood of surprise attacks by unknown groups whose members and supporters may be difficult to pinpoint.
We judge that groups of all stripes will increasingly use the internet to communicate, propagandise, recruit, train and obtain logistical and financial support.
AP
By
You can find this article at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/96B66353-9F35-4685-B6F9-5DF1F25A1C35.htm
Two soldiers' deaths highlight crisis in US morale
Monday October 2, 2006
By Cole Moreton
The troops are exhausted. They need reinforcements. Tanks are broken and there is no money to repair them. Fighting is fierce, morale low.
These sound like the complaints of British soldiers in Afghanistan - only last week an officer there declared he was quitting in disgust after his men had to borrow bullets from Canadians during a battle.
But the loudest complaints are not from the British. It is the US Army that is now in revolt. General Peter Schoomaker, its leader, is refusing to submit a budget to the Pentagon because he says his troops need billions of extra dollars to go on doing what is expected of them.
The news has shocked British squaddies, who are used to seeing the Americans as better equipped, better supported and better paid. If even the Yanks are in trouble, what hope can the Brits have?
Lance Corporal Jon Hetherington and Specialist Andrew Velez were both 22 when they died in Afghanistan this northern summer. They held similar ranks. Their lives and deaths reveal the differences between the allies, and puncture the myths.
The British Army says its soldiers are better equipped now than ever. The Ministry of Defence says troops on the frontline "have all got everything they need". Extra helicopters have been sent and the Army has spent $1.4 billion on new Mastiff vehicles to replace its ageing Land-Rovers.
The gear is arriving, even as the fighting has eased. But when troops like Lance Corporal Hetherington were deployed to Afghanistan this year, they were equipped to keep the peace and rebuild schools.
They coped, heroically, with the unexpected ferocity of the Taleban, some units fighting night and day for a month. But when equipment broke down under extreme use, roads became impassable and air support failed, they were in trouble. Reports suggest some ran out of ammunition, food and water.
Hetherington died in Musa Qala in the early hours of August 27. He had served his country for six years, a length of service which earns a British corporal $67,293 a year. A US equivalent, such as Specialist Velez, is paid around $70,246. The difference is that the US soldier in a war zone pays no tax. He may also have received up to $71,680 for enlisting, enough to lift a family from poverty. The British get no such payment, but the idea is being considered as recruiting levels fall.
The two forces have very different attitudes. British troops are now experienced peacekeepers, but those serving alongside Americans complain their allies believe "peacekeeping is for wimps". This has led to claims of excessive force.
The British Army has been based on regimental tradition, but some disgruntled soldiers say it is being dismantled by a reorganisation that has seen famous regiments such as the Black Watch absorbed into others.
Links with areas of the country where sons followed fathers into service were being broken, said a former Black Watch officer, along with the sense of belonging. "The Americans think, 'God, if only we had that system'. But now everything we value is under attack."
Few US soldiers can fault the immense investment in their kit, but the psychological demands on them appear greater. The British spend six months in action before returning to their home base to rest and train.
This has been eroded lately, but the intention remains. Americans must complete a two-year tour of duty before a year off. Some returning from Iraq have been stopped and told to go back.
The pressure got to Velez. In 2004 his brother, a corporal, was killed in the battle of Fallujah. He escorted the body home to Texas, asking his father, "Do you know how hard it was to talk to Fred when he was in a box of ice?" Despite hallucinations, he returned to the frontline. But on July 25, in camp in Sharon, he shot himself.
"Poor sod," said a British infantryman when told the story.
"We get bollock-all support from home, from the politicians and you lot in the media, but at least we get to come home, if we're lucky.
"What the Yanks expect from their boys, frankly, it shocks me."
THE GI v THE SQUADDIE - WHOSE KIT IS BEST?
By Cole Moreton
The troops are exhausted. They need reinforcements. Tanks are broken and there is no money to repair them. Fighting is fierce, morale low.
These sound like the complaints of British soldiers in Afghanistan - only last week an officer there declared he was quitting in disgust after his men had to borrow bullets from Canadians during a battle.
But the loudest complaints are not from the British. It is the US Army that is now in revolt. General Peter Schoomaker, its leader, is refusing to submit a budget to the Pentagon because he says his troops need billions of extra dollars to go on doing what is expected of them.
The news has shocked British squaddies, who are used to seeing the Americans as better equipped, better supported and better paid. If even the Yanks are in trouble, what hope can the Brits have?
Lance Corporal Jon Hetherington and Specialist Andrew Velez were both 22 when they died in Afghanistan this northern summer. They held similar ranks. Their lives and deaths reveal the differences between the allies, and puncture the myths.
The British Army says its soldiers are better equipped now than ever. The Ministry of Defence says troops on the frontline "have all got everything they need". Extra helicopters have been sent and the Army has spent $1.4 billion on new Mastiff vehicles to replace its ageing Land-Rovers.
The gear is arriving, even as the fighting has eased. But when troops like Lance Corporal Hetherington were deployed to Afghanistan this year, they were equipped to keep the peace and rebuild schools.
They coped, heroically, with the unexpected ferocity of the Taleban, some units fighting night and day for a month. But when equipment broke down under extreme use, roads became impassable and air support failed, they were in trouble. Reports suggest some ran out of ammunition, food and water.
Hetherington died in Musa Qala in the early hours of August 27. He had served his country for six years, a length of service which earns a British corporal $67,293 a year. A US equivalent, such as Specialist Velez, is paid around $70,246. The difference is that the US soldier in a war zone pays no tax. He may also have received up to $71,680 for enlisting, enough to lift a family from poverty. The British get no such payment, but the idea is being considered as recruiting levels fall.
The two forces have very different attitudes. British troops are now experienced peacekeepers, but those serving alongside Americans complain their allies believe "peacekeeping is for wimps". This has led to claims of excessive force.
The British Army has been based on regimental tradition, but some disgruntled soldiers say it is being dismantled by a reorganisation that has seen famous regiments such as the Black Watch absorbed into others.
Links with areas of the country where sons followed fathers into service were being broken, said a former Black Watch officer, along with the sense of belonging. "The Americans think, 'God, if only we had that system'. But now everything we value is under attack."
Few US soldiers can fault the immense investment in their kit, but the psychological demands on them appear greater. The British spend six months in action before returning to their home base to rest and train.
This has been eroded lately, but the intention remains. Americans must complete a two-year tour of duty before a year off. Some returning from Iraq have been stopped and told to go back.
The pressure got to Velez. In 2004 his brother, a corporal, was killed in the battle of Fallujah. He escorted the body home to Texas, asking his father, "Do you know how hard it was to talk to Fred when he was in a box of ice?" Despite hallucinations, he returned to the frontline. But on July 25, in camp in Sharon, he shot himself.
"Poor sod," said a British infantryman when told the story.
"We get bollock-all support from home, from the politicians and you lot in the media, but at least we get to come home, if we're lucky.
"What the Yanks expect from their boys, frankly, it shocks me."
THE GI v THE SQUADDIE - WHOSE KIT IS BEST?
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