Veterans for Common Sense

Senior American officials say they are confident that Iraq’s draft constitution will be approved in the referendum to be held Oct. 15, even though Sunni Arabs in Iraq are mobilizing in large numbers to defeat it.

In testimony before Congress on Thursday, the senior American military commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. of the Army, said the most recent analysis of intelligence from across the country supported the Bush administration’s optimistic predictions that the referendum would pass.

But if the constitution is defeated, several officials said they feared that Iraq would descend into anarchy.

Approval “is critically important,” a senior administration official said, “to maintain political momentum. That is the critical thing for holding this whole thing together.”

Private organizations in Iraq, many working with government financing, say their own analyses, based on discussions with hundreds of Iraqis, polling data and other information, have also led many of them to believe that the constitution would be approved.

Their calculations are complicated, because by law the constitution will fail if it is rejected by two-thirds of the voters in any three of Iraq’s 18 provinces, even if a majority of voters nationwide approve it.

In regions dominated by Sunni Arabs, opinion polls have shown sentiment running just about two to one against it. It is unclear, in those provinces, how get-out-the-vote campaigns by the opposing factions may tilt the balance, or how much the turnout on either side may be suppressed by the continuing violence.

But no matter how the vote goes, several officials said in interviews, the violence in Iraq is likely to increase significantly.

That prediction stands in contrast to the upbeat previous assessments from President Bush and others in his administration before other major turning points in Iraq, like the transition to Iraqi sovereignty in 2004 or the national elections early this year. The administration argued that insurgents would be demoralized by the success of democracy and that violence would decline.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, asked General Casey in a pointed exchange during the hearing on Thursday, “If there’s a strong majority of Sunnis, which is very possible, that vote against that constitution, could that not possibly lead to a worsening political situation rather than a better one?”

“I think that’s entirely possible,” the general replied. “I mean, as we’ve looked at this, we’ve looked for the constitution to be a national compact, and the perception now is that it’s not, particularly among the Sunnis.”

Officials say that if the constitution is defeated, insurgents will most likely believe that they have won a significant victory and be encouraged to fight on. Conversely, it is said, the insurgency will grow stronger if the voters approve the constitution, because that will anger Sunnis who opposed it and empower Sunni insurgents who can claim that their views were ignored.

“A vote for the constitution doesn’t mean we’re headed for peace and prosperity,” Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the Central Command, said in an interview this month. “Iraq is going to be a pretty difficult security environment for a while.”

A senior official said the Bush administration believed that the insurgency was likely to continue for years and would start to decline only “when Iraq’s political and economic system begins to consolidate.” The administration officials agreed to talk only if their names were not used, under administration policy for their departments.

Sunni Arabs, who held power when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, boycotted the election in January. But now, American officials and officers of private organizations working in Iraq say Sunnis are registering to vote in record numbers that exceed 80 percent in many areas.

“There’s a massive, massive effort, in mosques and other places, to get them to register,” the Iraq country director for the National Democratic Institute, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. He asked that his name not be used, because of security concerns. The institute is an organization financed by the United States government that works to promote democracy abroad.

Many Sunni Arabs are upset that the draft constitution grants Kurds and Shiite Arabs significant new authority to set up semi-independent areas but offers little specifically for them.

Still, the country director and others say they do not believe that the Sunni vote is likely to be monolithic. Many Sunni moderates, they say, are likely to vote in favor of the constitution and hope to influence how it is put into effect. The constitution seems likely to be approved by substantial majorities in the heavily Kurdish north and the predominantly Shiite south. In ethnically mixed Baghdad, the situation is more fluid.

Senior Pentagon and military officials who have been closely monitoring reports from Iraq predict that the referendum will fail by the two-thirds majority in the Sunni-dominated – and violence-plagued – Anbar Province in western Iraq. But intelligence reports indicate that only one other province at most will vote no by two-thirds.

“Nobody will be surprised to lose Anbar, and maybe one other province,” one Pentagon official said. “We’re not going to lose three.”

American political and military officials say a large Sunni vote will be a sign that democracy is taking hold in Iraq. Still, the United States is working hard to be sure that the Sunni opponents will not prevail. Among many steps, State Department officials said, Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States ambassador to Iraq, is meeting with Sunni Arab leaders almost every day, trying to persuade them to vote yes.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for this article.

What is the Radical Middle?

The Founders of this nation represented the first Radical Middle. Back then they called it “being liberal.” As George Washington said, “As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.”

They didn’t want King George or his military or corporate agents snooping in their houses, mails, or private matters; preventing them from organizing together and speaking out in public in protest of government actions; imprisoning them without access to attorneys, due process, or trials by juries of their peers; or reserving rights to himself that they felt should rest with the people or their elected representatives. (They ultimately wrote all of these in the Bill of Rights in our Constitution.)

They also didn’t want giant transnational corporations dominating their lives or their local economies. When, in 1773, King George III signed the Tea Act – a massive tax cut for the British East India Company – they protested this first attempt to WalMart-itize America by preventing the Company’s ships from landing in several cities up and down the eastern seaboard, and boarding and destroying over a million dollars (in today’s money) of tea in the ships that did dock in Boston. This was the beginning, by the Radical Middle, of the American Revolution.

The Radical Middle has always believed in fairness and democracy, and understood that completely unrestrained business activity and massive accumulations of wealth into a very few hands can endanger democratic institutions.

As James Madison said, “There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by … corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.” Similarly, John Adams wrote that when “economic power become concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny.”

Thomas Paine, among others, wrote at length about the dangers to a free people of the massive accumulation of wealth, and following the excesses of the Gilded Age – which led to massive corruption of the American government by corporate and wealth-based interests – laws were put into place limiting the size and behavior of corporations (such as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act), and taxing inheritance of the most massive of family estates so that a new hereditary aristocracy wouldn’t emerge in the nation that had thrown off the economic and political oppressions of the hereditary aristocracy of England.

The Radical Middle always believed in the idea of a commons – the things that we all own collectively, and administer the way we want through our elected representatives. Our parks, roads, police, fire, schools, and our government itself. Our ability to vote in fair and transparent elections. Our military and defense. Our systems for protecting our air, water, food, and pharmaceuticals. Our ability to retire in safety if we’ve worked hard and played the game by the rules, and to know that an illness won’t financially wipe us out.

Regardless of electoral politics (since both of the major political parties often overlook these values, and both have become corrupted by wealth and corporate influence), poll after poll shows that the vast majority of Americans embrace the values of the Radical Middle.

In recent years, America has been hijacked by the Radical Right. Corporations now write most of our legislation. Our elected representatives cater to the interests of wealth rather than what is best for the commons we collectively own, or what will sustain that bulwark of democracy known as the middle class. They have, in large part, seized control of our media, wiped out our family farms, and wiped out small, middle-class-owned businesses from our towns and cities. They seek a “merger of corporate and state interests” – a definition Mussolini used for what he called “fascism.”

The Radical Right has even gone so far as to use sophisticated psychological programming tools, like Newt Gingrich’s infamous “word list,” to paint the Radical Middle as some sort of insidious anti-Americanism.

We in the Radical Middle are calling for nothing less than a restoration of democracy, of government of, by, and for We The People, in a world that works for all.

The smell of blood pooled around a dead soldier. A mother’s scream as she cradled her wounded child. The screech of a mortar round that killed a close friend.

They are Spc. Tyler Peters’ souvenirs of war.

Peters, of Spencer, went to Iraq in 2003 with an Iowa Army National Guard unit that hauled medical supplies, food and ammunition to combat zones. He came home about 17 months ago from a yearlong tour and brought with him the fear and anguish of the battlefield.

It turned a laid-back 22-year-old soldier into a confused, sometimes angry and profoundly sad civilian.

“You’re not some crazy war vet,” Peters said. “You have an illness. It is from the war, and it is real.”

Government doctors call it post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that until the Vietnam generation was often dismissed as battle fatigue. It is now widely accepted among doctors and military leaders as a medical disorder.

A study last year in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that 20 percent of all soldiers who serve in Iraq and Afghanistan — the total, estimated at 1.1 million, includes repeat deployments — will develop varying degrees of post-traumatic stress. That compares with about 15 percent of the 3 million who fought in the 11-year Vietnam War, which ended in 1975.

Dr. Steven Hagemoser, a psychologist who works with post-traumatic stress patients at the Veterans Affairs hospitals in Des Moines and Knoxville, said he and his colleagues are braced for a flood of patients from the war on terror. Meanwhile, more than 200,000 American veterans, most of them from Vietnam, already receive federal disability payments for post-traumatic stress.

About a fourth of U.S. veterans who visited government hospitals for treatment between October 2003 and February 2005 were told they have mental disorders. Post-traumatic stress disorder was diagnosed in 10 percent of them. Military experts say the urban warfare and frequent terror attacks that dominate duty in Iraq and Afghanistan trigger the panic attacks, violent mood swings, chronic anxiety and depression.

‘I really had no control over what I was doing’

Peters has experienced them all. Fury and despair alternately consumed his days, which usually gave way to nightmarish sleep. He has quit a half-dozen jobs since he got back.

He wept at a fireworks show July 4 and had a fight with a former girlfriend that resulted in an assault charge. Peters violated a judge’s order to stay away from her. He spent 30 days in jail.

“I’m not proud of that, but it wasn’t me. I had this anger in me and certain things would just set me off,” he said. “I really had no control over what I was doing. It’s like I’d black out and realize later what I had done.”

The blackouts Peters describes are real, Hagemoser said. Veterans who have grown accustomed to constant danger often feel threatened, and when they do, they sometimes panic and respond as they would in combat: withdraw and hide, or attack. They often don’t realize what they’re doing.

“That person has an instant response to a very real fear,” Hagemoser said.

Doctors encourage veterans to look at the symptoms as treatable, not embarrassing. Prescription drugs, counseling and support groups have helped many reassemble their lives. But without help, post-traumatic stress can worsen.

For many, the diagnosis came years after the war ended. In fact, the American Psychiatric Association didn’t officially recognize post-traumatic stress disorder until the 1980s. Treatment programs were either untested or absent altogether.

War memories remain fresh, decades later

The fear of being labeled “crazy” fostered a stigma that kept untold thousands of others from treatment.

Terrance Rigby was among them. He left Vietnam 38 years ago, but the bloodshed he saw as an 18-year-old combat paratrooper haunted him for decades. It took him 25 years to get help.

“There were many days of mass casualties,” the Bettendorf man said, recalling the way he hauled wounded comrades away from firefights. “You’d pull a guy out and find he’s missing a limb, or you’d have to push his intestines back into his stomach. Those are the characteristics of an ugly beast.

“You don’t forget any of it. It doesn’t simply go away one day.”

Doctors say people have suffered post-traumatic stress after house fires and car accidents. The disorder struck New Yorkers after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But the rate among combat veterans is nearly twice that of the general population.

Some veterans suffer few, if any, ill effects

Yet some walk away from combat seemingly unscathed. Mental-health experts aren’t sure why.

Army Maj. Jeff Gabby of Urbandale, who returned from a tour in Iraq 17 months ago, said he’s adjusted to life at home without severe problems, although “it’s been a challenge.”

“We had people firing into our base every day,” he said. “They may just drive up or run up next to you at any point and blow themselves up, take you with them. I don’t think you just come back and forget stuff or get used to it.”

Kelly Alsbury of Spirit Lake saw the worst of war and quickly resumed a normal life when he returned from battle. Alsbury got back this summer from a mission in Afghanistan, where he lost friends in combat, saw a bomb explode next to his Humvee, and escaped enemy fire.

“The Taliban, they would kill us any chance they got,” said Alsbury, a National Guard infantryman. “And that is hard to live with, and it is hard to just come home and put that all aside, but you have to move on. That’s what I’m doing. I think I’m doing fine.”

Alsbury, in fact, has considered a second tour.

Guard contingent unlike Vietnam era

Alsbury and others in the military say that today’s all-volunteer armed forces are the best-trained soldiers in the world and that, unlike the Vietnam era, none of them were drafted off the street and rushed into combat.

But others note that a large portion of the United States’ active military is composed of part-time soldiers. Author John Crawford, a former member of the Florida National Guard who served in Iraq, writes that many Guard members signed up for weekend duty and extra money but got “very much more than they bargained for.”

Up to 80 percent of the Iowa Guard’s 9,600 members have been on duty at times since the war in Iraq started. Men and women who were teachers and lawyers one month became battle-ready warriors the next. Katina Mack, director of the Des Moines Vet Center, which provides free counseling, said such abrupt life changes can tax even the most well-prepared.

“Some, they have very deep mental wounds, and they will need medical help,” she said.

More than 1,900 U.S. soldiers have died since the war in Iraq started; more than 14,000 have been wounded.

Treatment helps Peters get back on track

After a year of depression and rage, and after his arrest, Peters sought treatment. Counseling at the VA clinic and Vet Center in Sioux Falls, S.D., and medication for depression and anxiety have helped.

Now he gets through most days without major problems. He works at a fast-food restaurant in Spencer and studies auto-body repair. He has rekindled friendships. His parents, older brother and two stepsisters have stood by him.

“He’s been through a hell of an ordeal,” said Peters’ father, Ron. “There were many days he had his mother and me so worried. We didn’t know what to do.

“This was a softhearted kid, a Boy Scout, a kid who had a lot of friends, who got along with most everybody. He liked working on cars and watching stock-car racing,” Peters’ father added. “He came back, he didn’t care about those things, he didn’t get along with people. But he knew he wasn’t crazy. He knew something was wrong, and he wanted to get help and get better.”

Doctors say the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) system is equipped to handle the stigma and the disorder.

“That mental scarring is permanent, and real. But at the same time, the person can learn to live with that,” Hagemoser said. “There is life after PTSD.”

Tyler Peters agrees.

Vivid flashbacks of war’s horror linger

Even now, though, he struggles. Flashbacks to war are so powerful, he said, he can’t imagine they’ll ever go away.

“There are nights, I’m trying to sleep and I can’t because all I smell is blood. It’s everywhere. You see the dead, including the innocent civilians just laying there in blood,” he said.

Other memories he doesn’t want to let go, including that of Spc. Josh Knowles of Sheffield. Knowles’ truck was behind Peters’ on a February day when it was struck with a mortar round. Sheffield was killed.

“The people left behind are the real heroes. The American public, I think, knows that,” said Peters, who stayed in the Guard. “I think they mostly support us. But there are some who don’t want to really deal with the problems we might have when we get home. I say to them: ‘Don’t degrade us, don’t call us crazy. Stay behind us. We are making a difference.’

“I’ve been asked if I’d do it all again, knowing what I know now. Absolutely, I would. . . . People just have to know that it wasn’t easy.”

The U.S. military in Iraq is increasingly concerned about roadside bombs that are taking a greater toll on U.S. troops than at any time since dictator Saddam Hussein was toppled in April, 2003. Iraqi insurgents are assembling bigger bombs and finding better ways to hide them, often foiling American efforts to counter their effectiveness.
At an American Army base in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad, hundreds of grieving soldiers gathered recently to pay their last respects to two comrades killed in action.
The Army National Guard soldiers, who died earlier this month, joined a growing list of U.S. troops killed by roadside bombs since the fall of Saddam Hussein in April, 2003.
According to statistics assembled by the Internet Web site, Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, a total of 550 American military personnel in Iraq have died in the past two-and-one-half years from injuries caused by what the military calls improvised explosive devices, known as IEDs.
In a worrying sign of the increasing deadliness of IEDs, 110 Americans were killed between May and July of this year. Last month, the toll reached an all-time monthly high of 40. This month, IEDs have killed more than 30.
Roadside bombs now account for an estimated 70 percent of all combat deaths among U.S. troops. In 2004, it was about 26 percent.
Even battle-hardened soldiers and Marines acknowledge that climbing into their Humvee vehicles to conduct daily patrols often causes feelings of fear and dread. Army Staff Sergeant Danny Machiavelo just spent the past six months working as a gunner and driver in a unit, which patrolled Baghdad’s once notoriously dangerous Airport Road.
“Yea, you get butterflies,” he admitted. “You are thinking about what can go wrong, not what can go right. If we think about what can go right, there is no need for anxiety. But we do not know what is going to happen. Every day is a different story.”
U.S. commanders say one of the reasons why IEDs have been so effective a weapon is the adept way in which insurgents conceal the roadside bombs.
Most IEDs are made of artillery or mortar shells, fitted with a remote detonator. A typical bomb is small enough that it can be hidden among ordinary roadside trash. IEDs have been found wrapped in burlap sacks, plastic bags, aluminum cans, pieces of clothing, and even inside dead animals.
Insurgents have also shown enormous skill in adapting to American countermeasures.
When roadside bombings began to rise last year, the Pentagon began rushing armored Humvees to most of its units in Iraq. Insurgents responded by building much bigger bombs.
Large artillery shells linked together in a series have inflicted multiple casualties, even on hardened steel vehicles.
Insurgents have also been adept at changing tactics. Until about a year ago, insurgents remained fairly close to the scene of the attack because they were using basic detonators such as wireless doorbells and car-alarm systems to set off the bombs.
When U.S. troops began spotting and killing the triggermen, insurgents began using cell phones and two-way radios instead. This allowed them to detonate hidden explosives from one to two kilometers away.
That move prompted the military to distribute electronic jamming devices on Humvees and other vehicles to block radio waves. But that has only solved a part of the problem.
Adaptive as ever, insurgents have begun deploying much more sophisticated and lethal types of IEDs, called shaped charges. Most of these manufactured bombs, designed to penetrate armored vehicles, are believed to be coming from neighboring Iran. And they are now being fitted with equally sophisticated detonating devices, aimed at bypassing electronic jammers.
Classified reports show that some of the shaped charges used in recent attacks against American convoys were armed with motion sensors and heat-sensitive infrared detectors to trigger explosions.
While U.S. military engineers and contractors grapple with the problems posed by evolving insurgent technology and tactics, commanders in Iraq are relying on several different methods to try to reduce IED casualties.
One of the methods involves a massive, 21-metric-ton vehicle called a buffalo. Its thick armor and an attached nine-meter mechanical arm give the U.S. military the ability to do what it could not do before – locate and disrupt IEDs before they can cause harm.
VOA recently rode on a buffalo in an evening mission with a group of Army combat engineers, who undertake this deadly task twice a day, six times a week. The so-called buffalo unit regularly patrols some of the worst IED-infested routes in Baghdad.
The buffalo’s mechanical arm operator, Private First Class Edgardo Bauzo, describes one of the routes that runs through the insurgent neighborhood of Dora, where roadside bombs have killed several Americans in recent weeks.
“We have found posters that say, ‘America, welcome to death’ or ‘You have come to take our blood to save Israel’,” he said. “So, the route marks itself as [saying] we are here and we are ready to do damage.”
For several hours, the buffalo, accompanied by two tanks and four Humvees, run laps around the area, scrutinizing every piece of suspicious looking item lying by the roadside. When an item appears to be a potential bomb, the buffalo’s mechanical arm is activated to poke at it and to determine what it is.
In some places in Iraq where the buffalo is not available, U.S. troops have no choice but to conduct patrols on foot, armed with little more than metal detectors and shovels to uncover IEDs. Snipers are also sometimes used to kill insurgents trying to plant explosives.
But with casualties still mounting from near-daily IED attacks, the U.S. military is aware that much more must be done to stay ahead of its adaptive and determined opponents.

John McCain and two other conservative Republican senators are right: Congress must do what it can to stop American soldiers from torturing prisoners.
It’s shocking and shameful to have to make such a statement. But we have to face facts. Since the wars started in Afghanistan and Iraq, prisoners in American custody have been systematically abused, tortured and in some cases killed.
We can no longer pretend these were bizarre aberrations by a handful of sadists. There is ample evidence that they were committed by intelligence officers, CIA agents and ordinary soldiers – apparently badly trained and led – who were told to “soften up” prisoners for interrogation.
The latest allegations come from a decorated captain and two sergeants in the 82nd Airborne. They say troops in their battalion routinely beat, burned and otherwise mistreated prisoners.
The Army already has punished 230 enlisted men and officers for such crimes. That’s reassuring as far as it goes, but it never should have been necessary.
That it was, suggests, at best, a lack of concern at the Pentagon for simple decency, not to mention international laws governing the treatment of prisoners.
One former prisoner, John McCain, knows what it’s like to be tortured. He doesn’t want other Americans to suffer a similar fate, and he knows it’s much more likely if we ourselves engage in such barbaric behavior.
He and Sens. John Warner of Virginia and Lindsay Graham of South Carolina (a former military lawyer) say they will introduce an amendment making it clear that American military forces may not “engage in torture.”
The Bush administration says it will oppose the amendment. It says the president might veto it.
Are we Americans, or not?

Iraq’s rushed constitutional process has deepened ethnic and sectarian rifts and is likely to worsen the insurgency and hasten the country’s violent break-up, the International Crisis Group (ICG) said on Monday.
“The constitution is likely to fuel rather than dampen insurgency,” said Robert Malley, head of the think-tank’s Middle East and North Africa program, introducing an ICG report.
“A compact based on compromise and broad consent could have been a first step in a healing process. Instead it is proving yet another step in a process of depressing decline.”
Iraqis are to vote on October 15 in a constitutional referendum on what the ICG calls a weak document that lacks consensus.
Its report says the draft, endorsed by Shi’ite Muslim cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, as well as Shi’ite and Kurdish parties, is likely to pass despite fierce Sunni Arab opposition.
The Sunnis, it says, are unlikely to muster the two thirds of votes in three provinces required to block its passage.
“Such a result would leave Iraq divided, an easy prey to both insurgents and sectarian tensions that have dramatically increased over the past year,” the ICG says.
To avert this outcome, it urges the United States to broker a last-minute political deal among Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds, before October 15 that would assuage Sunni fears of a Shi’ite “super-region” emerging in the south and of “de-Baathification.”
The parties would commit themselves to acting after December elections to limit to four the number of governorates that can fuse into an autonomous region, and not to bar Iraqis from office just because of past membership in the Baath party.
“There is strong reason to doubt whether such a strategy can succeed,” the report says, citing polarized communal positions. “But given the stakes, the U.S. cannot afford not to try.”
SUNNI ARABS LEFT OUT
The draft constitution drawn up since June bears the imprint of the Shi’ite and Kurdish parties that dominate the parliament elected in January polls largely boycotted by Sunni Arabs.
Fifteen Sunni Arab politicians were added to the drafting committee in an effort at inclusiveness, but the ICG says they felt increasingly marginalized after the August 1 decision not to seek a six-month extension of the drafting deadline.
Negotiations then took place informally among Shi’ite and Kurdish politicians. The Sunnis refused to sign their drafts.
The ICG report argues that U.S. pressure to stick to an arbitrary deadline reflected the Bush administration’s apparent desire to prepare for a significant military drawdown in 2006.
“As a result the constitution-making process became a new stake in the political battle rather than an instrument to resolve it,” the report says.
Sunni Arabs reject the draft mainly because they believe its provisions on federalism could lead to Iraq’s break-up, leaving them in a landlocked heartland without oil resources.
The proposed constitution is also vague and ambiguous on decentralization and powers of taxation, the ICG says, with many other questions left for future legislation — in parliaments where majority Shi’ites are likely to have the upper hand.
“The United States has repeatedly stated that it has a strategic interest in Iraq’s territorial integrity, but today the situation appears to be heading toward de facto partition and full-scale civil war,” the report says.