Veterans for Common Sense

U.S. general in Iraq: Growing disconnect with Washington

“I don’t know if I have the moral authority to send troops into combat anymore,” a senior American general recently told United Press International.
    
    He knows what his power means — that on his word hundreds or thousands of young men would step into danger.
    
    “I’m no longer sure I can look (a soldier or a Marine) in the eye and say: ‘This is something worth dying for.'”
    
    He doesn’t mean Iraq. There are plenty of bad people here to fight, and plenty of innocents worth protecting.
    
    His moral crisis was that he had been to Washington, D.C.
    
    He had been asked politically loaded questions from both sides of aisle about the war, each questioner seeking ammunition to use for their own political ends.    
    
    He was dismayed. And he’s not the only one.
    
    “Everything that happens in Iraq is viewed in Washington through a prism of whether it is good for George W. Bush or bad,” said a civilian U.S. official, who spoke to UPI on the condition he not be named.
    
    Successful election? “Proof” the invasion was the right thing to do. Car bombs in Baghdad? “Proof” this was wrong from the start.
    
    There is a growing disconnect between Washington and those fighting the Iraq war — between the people sweating in the desert, saddled with making the policy work, and the people in suits and air conditioning, hoping to be proven right in the end, on whichever side they sit.
    
    “I am seeing signs that are frustrating to me,” said Lt. Col. Mike Gibler, an Army battalion commander serving in Mosul whose father fought in the Vietnam war. “There are huge divides, and not only at the senior levels of government. There’s a competition for who wants to be the loudest voice to be heard regardless of what they say, regardless of what they know.
    
    “I am seeing a change in our nation’s willingness to support this over the long haul,” said Gibler.
    
    To many here, that political reductionism is obscene. It degrades their daily work as much as it does the loss of more than 1,900 Americans.
    
    The good in Iraq has been hard won — it was never a given. And the bad in all its forms — the car bombs, the ambushes, the rockets, the innocent dead — is the predictable product of warfare. Even putting aside the questionable post-war planning and rosy predictions, the outcome was always sure to include many, many undeserving deaths.
    
    Once a nation decides to go to war, the consequences will be ugly.
    
    It also interferes with their mission. One commander asked that a reporter not quote a junior officer who mentioned how thinly stretched the troops were in his area of operations. He didn’t mind that it be reported there weren’t enough troops — he could do with more — he just didn’t want it connected to him.
    
    He’s not a coward and he’s not a liar. He’s busy.
    
    “When people say stuff that conflicts with the politicians back home we just end up answering a lot of questions from D.C. We’re going backwards,” he said.
    
    Time spent on e-mail finessing opinions that are offered in honesty with professional military judgment is time taken away from the mission at hand.
    
    “The debate about the war is finally happening, but it is two years too late,” the U.S. official said.
    
    “It’s no bullshit on the ground here between us and the Iraqis. But back home it’s still in f(ing) ideological political mode,” he said. “We need to separate ‘accountability’ from ‘success.'”
    
    These officials now care far less who was right two-and-a-half years ago than they do about stabilizing Iraq and returning home with their troops in one piece.
    
    To do that, Washington needs to get serious about winning, they say. The White House and its congressional supporters are so focused on “staying the course,” and the opposition so intent on forcing the White House to admit its mistakes there seems to be no time for anything else.
    
    And there is actual work to be done.
    
    If the December elections are held and are successful, the U.S. military plans to begin pulling back, turning over more responsibility to local politicians and Iraqi security forces. While ostensibly a sign of progress, it will also be a time of great vulnerability for U.S. interests.
    
    Across Iraq, in small towns and large, there are young captains and lieutenants and sergeants who are not just patrolling streets but who are shepherding town councils and water projects. What will happen in those towns when those Americans are gone? Will the city council fall apart? Will the water pump break and not be fixed because of a lack of spares or money? How will U.S. forces, once on intimate terms with the town, know if things are turning dangerous?
    
    “There is going to be a vacuum when the military draws down,” the official said. “When they pull back, who is going to interface with the Iraqis? Before it’s stable enough for the (United Nations) and the (non-governmental organizations) to come in? What is the American face going to be in the interim?”
    
    The Iraqi government ministries are barely functioning; many are still being staffed, and few in their roles have experience working in a government meant to serve rather than dictate to the people.
    
    The troubles are understandable. Iraq has had four governments in three years — Saddam Hussein, Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, Ayad Allawi’s interim government, and Ibrahim Jaafari’s interim government. Each of these had its own favorites to staff and head ministries, and there has been frequent turnover — as well as a number of assassinations. In December, if all goes well, Iraq will get another government, and with it the attendant time it takes any government to organize. In Baghdad’s case, it is almost starting from scratch, again.
    
    But Iraq can not afford to serve its people poorly, not while an insurgency threatens a democratic existence. Baghdad’s ineffectiveness will only feed its opponents.
    
    “It’ll be the lack of government services that could make this fail,” said Army Lt. Col. Bradley Becker, in an interview with UPI in Qayyara, where he has been commanding a battalion for the last 11 months. “The people have to have confidence in the government, the teachers have to get paid.”
    
    U.S. interlocutors — nearly all of them military — have served as buffers so far, making things happen on the regional and local level that otherwise would not. Though the military presence may be diminished next year, there will not be a reduction in the requirement for American influence — money, problem-solving skills, and arm-twisting, the official said.
    
    Gen. George Casey, the top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, has held meetings with U.S. Ambassdor Zalmay Khalilizad to begin forming up provincial transition teams to take on the civil works after U.S. forces are reduced. Finding staff for it is a challenge, a senior military official told UPI.
    
    The State Department has fewer than 3,000 civilians assigned to Iraq, according to officials here, and nearly all of them are in Baghdad. There is just one State Department representative in all of vast Anbar province, home to some of the worst fighting.
    
    “The Department of State hasn’t mobilized for this war. They need to start assigning people … We have never had our A-Team here,” the U.S. official said. “The ratio is outrageous.”
    
    A senior military official said the United States needs “expeditionary diplomats, treasury planners, etc, if our goal is to win the peace, to create a better peace.”
    
    “When we do things — like initiating war with Saddam — and haven’t the managerial integrity to have the international and interagency blocks incorporated and integrated into the planning and execution, we end up with a mess paid for in lives of innocent Iraqis and U.S. servicemen and women.”
    
    The only way to be sure Iraq does not become the threat it was posited to be before the war, a safe haven for terrorists, is to raise the standard of living and the expectations of the people, creating a country of “haves” who don’t tolerate terrorists and thugs, and who have confidence their government and security force will back them up.
    
    Another looming problem that may need attention: whether the reconstruction projects undertaken by the United States with $18.6 billion appropriated in 2003 are actually bringing about stability. Some of the projects on the books won’t yield results for two or three years. And by the end of this year, all of the money earmarked for Iraq reconstruction will be committed or on contract, U.S. officials involved in reconstruction point out. There will be no flexibility after that to redirect money to high-impact projects — those that influence public opinion — unless there is new money for reconstruction.
    
    “We’re in a tactical security environment. I don’t give a rat’s ass that in two years the sewer system is going to work,” the U.S. official said. “We may not get there if we aren’t careful.”
    
    Khalilizad is reviewing the reconstruction priorities now, as did the ambassador before him, John Negroponte.
    
    Negroponte ended up taking money from water and electricity projects and pumping money into the security sector, but that may have been shortsighted. Projects that impact the quality of Iraqi’s lives in the short term may do more to shore up security than new guns and border forts, as Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli posits in an article for the July/August edition of Military Review.
    
    Chiarelli, whose Task Force Baghdad was responsible for policing the city’s restive Sadr City, overlays a map of the slum’s water and electrical infrastructure with its insurgent cells. There is a striking correlation: the worse the conditions, the more numerous the cells. As his troops improved that infrastructure with local projects, the fighting diminished.
    
    “The question is, are we — the Iraqi people, the United States and the international community — willing to take the time, energy and sacrifice to see it through?” said Gibler. “I honestly believe this can be won. I have to be optimistic. I couldn’t look them in the eye and tell them to go fight, otherwise.”

White House Tries to Quell a Rebellion on the Right

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 – The White House moved to contain a continuing revolt among conservatives on Thursday over President Bush’s selection of Harriet E. Miers for the Supreme Court. Some conservatives said that Ms. Miers could withdraw, and White House officials countered that the idea was preposterous.

The White House aides said they were now focusing their efforts on the Senate floor. “There’s frustration because people don’t know Harriet and they have all these questions,” said Ed Gillespie, the former Republican party chairman, who is helping shepherd Ms. Miers through her Senate hearings and who was pummeled by angry conservatives at a meeting earlier this week.

Republicans said that White House officials had not anticipated the intensity of the criticism and that conservative groups felt they had not been given adequate warning that Ms. Miers was the president’s pick.

“There might have been more comfort with her if she’d been discussed earlier,” said Grover G. Norquist, an influential conservative. He spoke to reporters in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building shortly after Mr. Bush addressed a gathering of conservatives at a tribute to William F. Buckley Jr. on the 50th anniversary of the founding of his magazine, National Review.

As Ms. Miers continued her meetings with senators on Capitol Hill, the administration stepped up its campaign to try to win her confirmation. The White House official in charge of reaching out to conservatives, Tim Goeglein, organized a conference call on Thursday afternoon to more than 500 conservatives, many of them dubious about the president’s selection, who listened to endorsements of Ms. Miers from some of the president’s closest allies on the right.

Among those extolling Ms. Miers’s conservative credentials were Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee; James C. Dobson, an evangelical conservative and the founder of the group Focus on the Family; Charles W. Colson, the founder and chairman of Prison Fellowship Ministries; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; Jay Sekulow of the evangelical American Center for Law and Justice; and Leonard A. Leo of the Federalist Society.

Mr. Colson urged conservatives to pull together because, he said, “it doesn’t matter if she walked across the Potomac,” the Democrats would still “demand their pound of flesh.”

Dr. Dobson, acknowledging the deep divisions among social conservatives, said he believed the president had been a consistent opponent of abortion.

“This is his personal belief and philosophy and I think probably theology, and I appreciate that,” he said. “I believe he has appointed a woman who is consistent with that.”

At his daily press briefing, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, announced that Daniel R. Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana and the former United States ambassador to Germany, would serve as a “public advocate” for Ms. Miers and accompany her on her meetings with senators, much as former Senator Fred Thompson did for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Republicans said Mr. Coats was chosen in part because he has strong ties to both parties.

The president made no mention of the conservative rebellion in his tribute to Mr. Buckley and National Review, even though the audience included a number of conservatives who have been harshly critical of his choice of Ms. Miers, most notably the columnist George F. Will, who sat in the front row, and the magazine editor William Kristol, in the back row.

After the event, Mr. Kristol said it was “not out of the question” that Ms. Miers could withdraw.

“She did not come to Washington to be a Supreme Court justice,” he said in a telephone interview as he drove to Richmond, Va. “And she could well decide that this is hurting the president, and could continue to hurt the president, and that the best thing to do would be to step aside and go back to serving the president and let him make another pick.”

In contrast, Mr. Norquist said that he expected her to be confirmed, but that it was impossible to know if she would be as conservative as Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia or as much of a disappointment to the right as Justice David H. Souter.

“If in July all the decisions come down and she executes all the bad people and she votes with Thomas and Scalia, then the president will say, ‘Hey, hey, see,’ ” Mr. Norquist said. “And all the conservatives will go, ‘O.K.’ If she’s more dodgy, and looks more like Souter, people will be disappointed, and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.”

David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting for this article.

His mother wished she never let her 19-year-old son join the military. His brother wished he would have coaxed Baez into the Navy.

But it’s unlikely either could have persuaded the headstrong and confident Baez differently. The Army was his first job. He signed up for six years until his mother went back to the recruiter and changed his enlistment to three years. He slept next to a checklist that included running, pushups and situps, things to do to prepare for boot camp. He was proud of his meager pay and came home always asking his mother what she wanted to buy.

Baez died in Haqlaniyah, Iraq, on Monday, when an explosive device blew up near his Humvee, according to the Defense Department. He had three diplomas – infantry training, javelin course and airborne course – framed on his dresser. He had a can of spray starch on his entertainment center. He had an “Army of One” bumper sticker above his bed.

Baez was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division.

“We did not enjoy our son after high school,” Baez’s mother, Jeannette Carrasco, 48, wailed from a hallway. The recruiter had stolen him away too quickly after his graduation from Tampa’s Alonso High School.

Now, there is a blue candle pooling wax in the living room where Baez’s picture sits on a small stand. He wears Army fatigues behind a stretched tight American Flag.

Nearby a stack of pictures are tossed on the dining room table. A picture of mother wrapping her arms around the neck of her youngest son, “Robertcito,” little Robert, stands out.

“He really had everything,” said Carlos Baez, 57, Roberto’s father and Carrasco’s husband. “A good friend; a good son.”

Juan Carlos Baez, 28, said his brother wanted to join the military after Sept. 11, 2001. He used to quiz Juan about the Navy.

“He wanted me to talk to him about the Navy,” Juan Carlos said. “I wasn’t ready. I was going through some hard times, and I didn’t open up about it.”

So Roberto joined the Army when his time came.

“I would have rather he joined the Navy,” Juan Carlos said, standing in his room, where baseball trophies and an apple-shaped pigg y bank sits on his dresser. “I just would have wanted to talk to him about the Navy or veer him to the Navy.”

Roberto Baez’s mother said he wanted the Army to pay for college so he could be a psychiatrist. He was good with people. He would befriend children. He would speak to seniors. He would give up his television for his young niece.

But his best friend of 16 years, Brian Pena, 18, said he was content finishing his career in the Army. He wanted to put in 20 years, Pena said.

“He wanted it to be his career,” Pena said. “It was his first job, and he was proud of it.”

Nearby are Baez’s books: The U.S. Army Infantry Training Brigade. The Iraq War. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six.

His mother knows he was meant for the military. He used to shut off the ceiling fan and air conditioner on Saturday mornings just to sweep his room when other teens would be sleeping.

“He was like a little big boy,” she said.

“I’m upset,” Carrasco added. “Being so young, they send him over there, and I don’t agree with that. They’re young kids.”

Then she got tired of talking.

“I never get tired of talking unless someone hurt me,” Carrasco said.

“It hurts me not to have him here.”

Senate Moves to Protect Military Prisoners Despite Veto Threat WASHINGTON, October 5, 2005 – In a sharp rebuke to the White House, the Senate overwhelmingly agreed Wednesday to regulate the detention, interrogation and treatment of prisoners held by the American military.

The measure ignited a fierce debate among many Senate Republicans and the White House, which threatened to veto a $440 billion military spending bill if the detention amendment was tacked on, saying it would bind the president’s hands in wartime. Nonetheless, the measure passed, 90 to 9, with 46 Republicans, including Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, joining 43 Democrats and one independent in favor.

More than two dozen retired senior military officers, including Colin L. Powell and John M. Shalikashvili, two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, endorsed the amendment, which would ban use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” against anyone in United States government custody.

It would also require all American troops to use only interrogation techniques authorized in a new Army field manual. It would not cover techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Republicans and Democrats took to the Senate floor on Wednesday in a passionate debate over the measure, which supporters said would clarify a jumble of conflicting standards and cast a new spotlight on the treatment of detainees at American prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Cuba. “Confusion about the rules results in abuses in the field,” said Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican and the measure’s main sponsor. “We need a clear, consistent standard.”

Mr. McCain, who was a prisoner of war in the Vietnam War, added in closing Wednesday night: “Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them even unto death. But every one of us – every single one of us – knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies.”

Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, questioned why the White House would oppose a measure that codifies military procedures and policies, and reaffirms a ban against torturing detainees. “It is time for Congress, which represents the people, to clarify and set the rules for detention and interrogation of our enemies,” he said.

Opposing the effort, Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, said that requiring American troops to follow procedures in the Army manual was not practical in the current war environment. “The techniques vary upon the circumstances and the physical location of people involved,” Mr. Stevens said

The measure faces stiff opposition in the House. And the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said, “If it’s presented, then there would be a recommendation of a veto.” Armed with the strong Senate vote, however, Mr. McCain is expected to keep the pressure on in the public arena and when the spending bill goes to a House-Senate conference committee.

Mr. McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina offered the same proposal during the summer as the Senate was working on a bill setting Pentagon policy. But Mr. Frist scuttled that legislation in part because of White House opposition.

In July, the White House dispatched Vice President Dick Cheney to Capitol Hill to lobby Senators McCain, Graham and John W. Warner of Virginia personally. This week, White House officials not only pressured Mr. McCain to modify his measure, but also approached sympathetic Senate Republicans to work against the amendment.

The Senate vote drew applause from human rights organizations. “Senator McCain’s amendments are a key step toward the restoration of the military’s traditional prohibition against torture and inhumane treatment,” said Leonard S. Rubenstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights.

The vote came two weeks after the Army began an inquiry into new allegations of prisoner abuse in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 by members of a battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division. Three former members of the unit who have come forward have said many American troops who interrogated detainees did not know which techniques were permitted.

As the debate over detainees and Pentagon policy proceeded, senior Senate Democrats pressed the Bush administration Wednesday to lay out a detailed strategy for the war as Iraqis prepare to vote next week on a constitution. “It’s simply time for some accountability,” said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.

In a letter to the president, Mr. Biden and other Democrats asked Mr. Bush a series of pointed questions: How many Iraqi forces can operate without United States assistance? What specific steps is the administration taking around the referendum to reconcile Iraq division? What is being done to attract more international support to stabilize Iraq? How should the public assess progress?

“In times past, when asked to explain your Iraq policy to our troops and the American people, you have chosen to reply that we need to ‘stay the course,’ ” the letter said. “But simply staying the current course is not a strategy for success.”

Carl Hulse contributed reporting for this article.

The Pentagon has not completed guidelines for allowing soldiers, their families and charities to be reimbursed for some combat equipment they bought for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, a year after the passage of legislation calling for such a program.

    The measure, which allows for groups and individuals to make claims of up to $1,100, called for the Department of Defense to set rules for a reimbursement program by February 2005.

    The sponsor of the original legislation, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, says he plans to introduce an amendment to a defense bill this week to take authority for the program from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and give it to military commanders in the field.

    “We should not be sending our young men and women into harm’s way less than as well prepared as their nation can prepare them and provide them with the kind of protection they deserve,” Mr. Dodd said. “The Pentagon has never acted on this legislation despite the fact that it is the law of the land.”

    “It has been frustrating,” he said. “And the problem still persists.”

    On Friday, a Pentagon spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, said in an e-mail message that Defense Department officials were “in the final stages of putting a reimbursement program together and it is expected to be operating soon.” Colonel Krenke declined to discuss a reason for the delay.

    Army surveys have shown that infantry members spend hundreds of dollars of their own money each year on gloves, boots, flashlights and other tools used in combat.

    The reimbursement program, to be open to troops in combat zones, would cover spending on health, safety and protective equipment – items like body and vehicle armor, special hydration gear, global positioning devices and advanced combat helmets.

    Some troops in Iraq have complained that equipment is either lacking or worn, and that they sometimes do not have the necessary gear to protect them from roadside bombs and snipers.

    Sgt. Todd B. Bowers, a Marine Corps reservist attending George Washington University here, has served two tours in Iraq. Sergeant Bowers said a rifle scope and goggles that his father bought for him saved his sight when he was shot in the face by a sniper last October. Mr. Bowers spent about $900 for the equipment.

    “There are a lot of people serving in the military who do not have the income to pay for some equipment,” he said in a telephone interview. “It is not fair that those who have the money can be better prepared than others.”

    Officials in the Defense Department initially opposed the program last year, arguing that it would be a financial burden and could undermine the accountability and effectiveness of equipment used in combat.

    The Army has its own program, called the Rapid Fielding Initiative, to develop and outfit soldiers with the most modern equipment available.

    Michael P. Kline, a retired master sergeant who is executive director of the Enlisted Association of the National Guard of the United States, said families and charities, and soldiers themselves, had had to fulfill the military obligation to provide proper combat equipment.

    “National Guard and reservists have been especially adversely impacted by the Pentagon’s decision not to move this program forward,” Sergeant Kline said. “Due to equipment shortages in the Guard, these soldiers spend a lot of money out of pocket. These patriotic men and women deserve to have their expenses reimbursed.”

MILITANT insurgent groups responsible for killing thousands of Iraqi civilians over the past two years are guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch charges today.

In a report chronicling the killing of an estimated 15,000 men, women and children by insurgents, the organisation insists that international law applies equally to US-led forces as well as those claiming to resist foreign occupation. “The armed conflict in Iraq is regulated by the 1949 Geneva Conventions and customary international laws,” says the report, Iraq: Insurgent Groups Responsible for War Crimes.

Many insurgent groups are operating in Iraq, from Islamic extremists to members of the ousted Baath party and Sunni Muslim nationalists. Three groups are blamed for most of the worst abuses: al-Qaeda in Iraq, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Ansar al-Sunna (Supporters of the Sunni) and Ansar al-Islam (Supporters of Islam).

Human Rights Watch has produced numerous reports critical of the US military and the Iraqi Government’s behaviour since the invasion in 2003. Sarah Leah Whitson, who heads the group’s Middle East and Africa division, said it was important that insurgents were also called to account.

The report coincides with fears that foreign fighters in Iraq, responsible for some of the worst outrages, may return home and use similar tactics against pro-Western governments in the Arab world and beyond.

The claim was based on captured documents found with Abu Azzam, a commander in al-Zarqawi’s group, who was killed last month in Baghdad. “We got hold of a very important letter from Abu Azzam to Zarqawi asking him to begin to move a number of Arab fighters to the countries they came from to transfer their experience in car bombings in Iraq,” Bayan Jabor, the Iraqi Interior Minister, said. A report by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies said that there were about 30,000 insurgent fighters in Iraq, with foreign volunteers making up to 10 per cent.