Veterans for Common Sense

Iran resumed uranium conversion on Monday at its facility near Isfahan, a move EU officials have warned will probably see its nuclear case sent to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions.

“The uranium conversion facility in Isfahan has started its activities under IAEAsupervision,” Mohammad Saeedi, deputy head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, told reporters at the plant.

Iran agreed to suspend all nuclear fuel work last November as part of a deal with the European Union while both sides explored a long-term arrangement for Iran’s nuclear program.

But Tehran has complained about the slow pace of the negotiations and on Saturday rejected an EU proposal offering it economic and political incentives to halt nuclear fuel work for good.

At the Isfahan plant two workers wearing white overalls, face masks and hard hats lifted a barrel full of uranium yellow cake, opened its lid and fed it into the processing line.

Other workers at the plant watched excitedly via closed circuit television screens.

A nuclear scientist at the site, who declined to be named, said: “I am excited, I didn’t believe it until the last moment thinking this may not happen, but now I am very happy.”

Earlier a Reuters journalist, among a small group of local and foreign reporters invited to visit the plant, said it was surrounded by dozens of anti-aircraft batteries, patrolled by heavy security and surrounded by barbed wire fences.

The plant is in a dry industrial area about 20 km (12.5 miles) southeast of Isfahan.

Iran denies U.S. accusations that its nuclear program is a front for bomb-making. It says it needs to develop nuclear power as an alternative energy source to meet booming electricity demand and preserve its oil and gas reserves for export.

It has offered to export the uranium hexafluoride produced at Isfahan to allay Western concerns that it could be enriched into bomb-grade material.

NEW NUCLEAR CHIEF

The former state broadcasting head Ali Larijani, a conservative with close ties to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will replace Hassan Rohani as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, the official IRNA news agency reported on Monday.

European diplomats had expressed concerns that pragmatic cleric Rohani, who has led Iran’s nuclear negotiations with the EU since 2003, may be replaced by a more hardline official when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office this month, signaling a hardening of Iran’s nuclear policy stance.

Britain, Germany and France have called an emergency meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors for Tuesday to warn Iran not to resume work at Isfahan.

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy on Friday called on Iran to “listen to reason” and said if Iran resumed its nuclear activities, “the international community will surely bring the issue to the Security Council.”

Iran on Saturday rejected a package of economic and political incentives presented by the EU’s big three countries aimed at persuading Tehran to scrap nuclear fuel work for good.

Iranian officials said the EU proposal, which included offers of help to develop civilian nuclear energy and in becoming a major transit route for Central Asian oil, was unacceptable because it denied Iran the right to produce its own nuclear fuel for power reactors.

However, Iran has so far been careful to stress that it is not restarting work on the most sensitive element of the nuclear fuel cycle — uranium enrichment, a process that can be used to make reactor fuel or atomic warheads.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry said on Sunday Tehran had nothing to fear from referral of its case to the Security Council.

The IAEA has been investigating Iran’s nuclear program for three years after an exiled Iranian opposition group revealed the existence of undisclosed facilities there.

While the IAEA has highlighted numerous failures by Iran to report potentially weapons-related activities, it has found no “smoking gun” that would confirm U.S. suspicions that it is secretly trying to make bombs.

The angry mother of a fallen U.S. soldier staged a protest near President Bush’s ranch Saturday, demanding an accounting from Bush of how he has conducted the war in Iraq.

Supported by more than 50 demonstrators who chanted, ”W. killed her son!” Cindy Sheehan told reporters: ”I want to ask the president, ‘Why did you kill my son? What did my son die for?”’ Sheehan, 48, didn’t get to see Bush, but did talk about 45 minutes with national security adviser Steve Hadley and deputy White House chief of staff Joe Hagin, who went out to hear her concerns.

Appreciative of their attention, yet undaunted, Sheehan said she planned to continue her roadside vigil, except for a few breaks, until she gets to talk to Bush. Her son, Casey, 24, was killed in Sadr City, Iraq, on April 4, 2004. He was an Army specialist, a Humvee mechanic.

”They (the advisers) said we are in Iraq because they believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that the world’s a better place with Saddam gone and that we’re making the world a safer place with what we’re doing over there,” Sheehan said in a telephone interview after the meeting.

”They were very respectful. They were nice men. I told them Iraq was not a threat to the United States and that now people are dead for nothing. I told them I wouldn’t leave until I talked to George Bush.”

She said Hagin told her, ”I want to assure you that he (Bush) really does care.”

”And I said if he does care, why doesn’t he come out and talk to me.”

Sheehan arrived in Crawford aboard a bus painted red, white and blue and emblazoned with the words, ”Impeachment Tour.” Sheehan, from Vacaville, Calif., had been attending a Veterans for Peace convention in Dallas.

The bus, trailed by about 20 cars of protesters and reporters, drove at about 15 mph toward Bush’s ranch. After several miles, they parked the vehicles and began to march, in stifling heat, farther down the narrow country road.

Flanked by miles of pasture, Sheehan spoke with reporters while clutching two photographs, one of her son in uniform, and the other, a baby picture, when he was seven months old.

She said she decided to come to Crawford a few days ago after Bush said that fallen U.S. troops had died for a noble cause and that the mission must be completed

”I want to ask the president, ‘Why did you kill my son? What did my son die for?” she said, her voice cracking with emotion. ”Last week, you said my son died for a noble cause’ and I want to ask him what that noble cause is?”

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said response that Bush also wants the troops to return home safely.

”Many of the hundreds of families the president has met with know their loved one died for a noble cause and that the best way to honor their sacrifice is to complete the mission,” Duffy said.

”It is a message the president has heard time and again from those he has met with and comforted. Like all Americans, he wants the troops home as soon as possible.”

The group marched about a half-mile before local law enforcement officials stopped them at a bend in the road, still four to five miles from the ranch’s entrance. Capt. Kenneth Vanek of the McLennan County Sheriff’s Office said the group was stopped because some marchers ignored instructions to walk in the ditch beside the road, not on the road.

”If they won’t cooperate, we won’t,” Vanek said.

The Pain Deep Inside

Bob Herbert, New York Times, August 8, 2005

Specialist Craig Peter Olander Jr. has the look of a mischievous kid, except that his eyes sometimes telegraph that they’ve seen too much. And there’s a weariness that tends to slip into his voice that seems unusual for someone just 21 years old. Killing can do that to a person.

Specialist Olander was a teenager from Waynesburg, Ohio, population 1,000, when he joined the Army in 2003. “It was very appealing,” he said. “The benefits. College. And it was something I’d always wanted to do since I was a small boy – be in the Army.”

He had mixed feelings about going to Iraq, but he wasn’t particularly upset. He didn’t dwell on the possibility of getting killed or wounded. And he gave no thought at all to the spiritual or psychological toll that combat can take. “I was very confident in my training and I was very religious,” he said. “I’d always read Bible stories as a child and I believed the Lord would look over me and his will would be done.”

He went to Iraq in early 2004 and quickly learned that nothing – not his military training, not the Bible, nothing – had adequately prepared him for the experience. By the time he returned several months later, he said, the trauma he had encountered in Iraq had reached deep inside him. There was both fear and the hint of a plea in his voice as he told me, with surprising candor, that he believed the things he’d had to do in Iraq might jeopardize the salvation of his soul.

“Our base was Camp Victory in Baghdad,” he said. “We did raids, convoys, security, patrols – numerous, numerous things.”

The first time he was wounded was in the spring. He suffered a severe concussion and a sprained back when insurgents attacked his convoy with an antitank weapon. The headaches that ensued were all but unbearable. He was wounded again the following August.

“I was driving the Humvee that day,” he said. “The usual driver wasn’t sure of the area, so we switched. He was a new fellow and he was up on the gun.”

When insurgents attacked the unit with rocket-propelled grenades, Specialist Olander tried to maneuver the Humvee to safety. As he was turning, an explosion sent the vehicle into a roll.

“I stayed conscious,” he said. “As soon as the vehicle stopped rolling, I hopped out and I heard my sergeant hollering on the radio that we were hit. So I knew he was O.K. So I immediately went to the gunner, who was pinned under the Humvee. He was still alive at that point but he lost consciousness very quickly because the weight had stopped him from being able to breathe.

“We jacked the vehicle up. And right around that time, I’d say, once we got the vehicle off of him, unfortunately, he passed away.”

Specialist Olander said he reached for a machine gun as the insurgents continued to fire with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms. “We engaged numerous individuals and killed them,” he said.

When I asked if he knew how many insurgents he personally had killed, he said, “Three, for sure.”

Specialist Olander sustained a number of injuries, including another concussion. “And my face was messed up pretty good,” he said. But his major problems then and now, as he readily acknowledges, “are emotional and psychological.”

He is filled with guilt. Several of his friends have been killed, and he thinks he could have done something to save the gunner who died. “I felt it may have been my fault that it happened,” he said. “Maybe I could have handled the situation differently.”

He is also filled with turbulent emotions related to the insurgents that he killed. “I had no hesitation about pulling the trigger,” he said. “But the aftermath is what hurt. Before I joined the military, I valued life very much, so taking it was hard. It’s confusing trying to figure it out, you know, because sometimes I feel rage toward them.

“But then it becomes a very religious thing, because I wonder, you know, since I’ve taken these lives, if I’m going to be accepted into heaven. You know, have I done the right thing?”

Specialist Olander is being treated for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center here. He expects to head back to Waynesburg in a few weeks, where he’ll stay for a while in a trailer that sits in a campground “out in the middle of nowhere.”

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

Where are the Iraq War Heroes?

Damien Cave, New York Times, August 7, 2005

One soldier fought off scores of elite Iraqi troops in a fierce defense of his outnumbered Army unit, saving dozens of American lives before he himself was killed. Another soldier helped lead a team that killed 27 insurgents who had ambushed her convoy. And then there was the marine who, after being shot, managed to tuck an enemy grenade under his stomach to save the men in his unit, dying in the process.

Their names are Sgt. First Class Paul R. Smith, Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester and Sgt. Rafael Peralta. If you have never heard of them, even in a week when more than 20 marines were killed in Iraq by insurgents, that might be because the military, the White House and the culture at large have not publicized their actions with the zeal that was lavished on the heroes of World War I and World War II.

Many in the military are disheartened by the absence of an instantly recognizable war hero today, a deficiency with a complex cause: public opinion on the Iraq war is split, and drawing attention to it risks fueling opposition; the military is more reluctant than it was in the last century to promote the individual over the group; and the war itself is different, with fewer big battles and more and messier engagements involving smaller units of Americans. Then, too, there is a celebrity culture that seems skewed more to the victim than to the hero.

Collectively, say military historians, war correspondents and retired senior officers, the country seems to have concluded that war heroes pack a political punch that requires caution. They have become not just symbols of bravery but also reminders of the war’s thorniest questions. “No one wants to call the attention of the public to bloodletting and heroism and the horrifying character of combat,” said Richard Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina. “What situation can be imagined that would promote the war and not remind people of its ambivalence?”

Heroism in the past was easier to highlight. In World War I, men like Sgt. Alvin York, a sharpshooter from Tennessee who captured 132 German soldiers with only a few rifles and a handful of men, were lauded by the military and devoured by the public. A ticker-tape parade in Manhattan greeted the sergeant’s return.

During World War II, the military became even more sophisticated. Responding to the propaganda campaigns of Mussolini and Hitler, every branch of the military created a public relations office, said Paul Kennedy, a military historian at Yale. Heroes were even brought home specifically to rally support for the war.

Richard I. Bong, for example, an Army Air Corps pilot who came to be known as the Ace of Aces, was sent home in December 1944 after shooting down his 40th Japanese plane. He was dispatched immediately on a nationwide tour to help sell war bonds.

Audie Murphy, perhaps the best-known World War II hero, took part in similar tours. He went on to act in 44 Hollywood films, including his own autobiography, “To Hell and Back.” Dozens of other combat heroes played roles in the war’s promotion.

“Everyone was involved,” said Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The deliberate mobilization of the home front was considered a major priority by government in a way that it’s just not now.”

The change began, historians said, with the murky stalemate of the Korean War, which did not require as much mobilization or support as previous wars. Vietnam cemented the shift. While the swashbuckling Green Berets were lionized in the war’s early years, by 1968 the public became skeptical of military planners who perpetually predicted a victory that never came.

“What happened very quickly was a move away from the bravery of the kids fighting,” David Halberstam, the author and former war correspondent, said in an interview. The question that ran through everyone’s mind was, Can this war be won?

“We had absolute military superiority but they had absolute political supremacy,” Mr. Halberstam said. “That led to a stalemate – and that became the governing issue.”

The military responded by pulling inward, said Maj. Bruce Norton, a Vietnam veteran and the author of a book of military award recipients, “Encyclopedia of American Military Heroes.” He recalled the case of a marine who received the Navy Cross, the second-highest military honor, in the mail.

President Bush has taken the middle road. He presented the Medal of Honor to the family of Sergeant Smith in a White House ceremony on April 4. He praised Sergeant Peralta, a Mexican immigrant, in a radio address and at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast in June.

But these citations did not occur in prime time, nor have they been repeated. And Sergeant Smith’s Medal of Honor is the only one that has been awarded for action in Iraq.

Meanwhile, despite recruiting shortfalls, the Army’s television advertisements have not featured the stories of Sergeant Smith or Sergeant Hester, the first woman since World War II to receive a Silver Star.

“We have not done as much as we ought to be doing to remind people that we’re at war,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a military historian at Johns Hopkins University, whose son is an infantry officer about to ship to Iraq.

Perhaps, some experts said, the military knows that promotion will attract unwanted scrutiny. After the heroic tales of Pfc. Jessica Lynch and Sgt. Pat Tillman were largely debunked – with Private Lynch shown to have never fired a shot during her capture and rescue in Iraq, and Sergeant Tillman killed accidentally by fellow Americans, not the enemy, in Afghanistan – the Pentagon may have grown cautious.

“The military wouldn’t be foolish enough to choose a soldier and promote them,” said Mark Bowden, the author of “Black Hawk Down,” “in part because of widespread ambivalence about the war.”

Or, as some suggest, perhaps the military, which has always been uncomfortable with elevating one soldier’s actions over the efforts of others, would rather favor the group than the individual. “Everyone is in it, fighting 110 percent, so unless there is an act of truly outstanding heroism, you don’t want to select just one,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Mr. Mead said that “the cult of celebrity has cheapened fame.” He added, “What’s a war hero to do? Go on ‘Oprah’?”

Many military experts also said the short shrift given to heroes cannot be separated from the specifics of the war. Fighting an insurgency does not lend itself to individual heroism, said Maj. Gen. John G. Meyer Jr., who retired in 2000 as the Army’s chief of public affairs. “It’s more like guerrilla warfare,” he said. “It’s not the Battle of the Bulge, where we have massive battles and we get a single hero out of it.”

So instead of highlighting heroes, the military and the White House favor a two-pronged approach: for those who are likely to support the war, there is occasional talk of heroic sacrifice; for the larger national audience, there are speeches about victory.

It is a rhetorical split that mirrors the larger national divide between the minority who serve in the military and those who do not, said Anthony Swofford, a former Marine and the author of “Jarhead.” And it leaves important stories untold and unappreciated. “There might be heroes,” Mr. Swofford said, “in some of those coffins.”

The Pentagon’s reliance on National Guard and Reserve troops to fight the war in Iraq has brought clusters of combat deaths to U.S. towns for the first time in more than 50 years.

The deaths of 19 Marine reservists from an Ohio unit in the past week highlight the risks to part-time military units, which earlier this year hit a peak of about 40{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of U.S. troop strength in Iraq.

Since the Civil War, when entire towns shared in the grief of combat losses, the active-duty military has shifted away from using locally based units. The heavy use of Guard and Reserve units in Iraq has undercut a tradition that kept most of these troops out of combat since World War II and Korea. The military also restricted the number of family members required to serve in combat following World War II after multiple siblings died in battle.

When a large number of casualties hits a community, it causes “a pocket of trauma,” says Jim Martin, a retired Army colonel who teaches military culture at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. “It’s aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, boyfriends and girlfriends. … It’s not just 20 families, it’s 200 families.”

In January, four Marine reservists from a combat engineer unit in Lynchburg, Va., were killed in an ambush near Baghdad. In May 2004, five men from a Navy Reserve unit in Jacksonville died in a mortar attack near Ramadi. Two days earlier, two other members of that unit were killed.

Such concentrations of casualties were once common, as during the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944, when 19 men from a Bedford, Va., unit were killed.

Few Guard and Reserve troops were deployed during the Vietnam War. After that war, the Pentagon shifted large numbers of critical support jobs to the Guard and Reserves. That made it difficult to go to war without part-time units.

Guard and Reserve troops were mobilized broadly for the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which ended with relatively few casualties. One exception: a missile attack that killed 13 Pennsylvania reservists.

Saturday is the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The nuclear powers are commemorating it in their own special way: by seeking to ensure that the experiment is repeated.

    As Robin Cook showed in his column last week, the British government appears to have decided to replace our Trident nuclear weapons, without consulting parliament or informing the public. It could be worse than he thinks. He pointed out that the atomic weapons establishment at Aldermaston has been re-equipped to build a new generation of bombs. But when this news was first leaked in 2002 a spokesman for the plant insisted the equipment was being installed not to replace Trident but to build either mini-nukes or warheads that could be used on cruise missiles.

    If this is true it means the government is replacing Trident and developing a new category of boil-in-the-bag weapons. As if to ensure we got the point, Geoff Hoon, then the defence secretary, announced before the leak that Britain would be prepared to use small nukes in a pre-emptive strike against a non-nuclear state. This put us in the hallowed company of North Korea.

    The Times, helpful as ever, explains why Trident should be replaced. “A decision to leave the club of nuclear powers,” it says, “would diminish Britain’s international standing and influence.” This is true, and it accounts for why almost everyone wants the bomb. Two weeks ago, on concluding their new nuclear treaty, George Bush and the Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh announced that “international institutions must fully reflect changes in the global scenario that have taken place since 1945. The president reiterated his view that international institutions are going to have to adapt to reflect India’s central and growing role.” This translates as follows: “Now that India has the bomb it should join the UN security council.”

    It is because nuclear weapons confer power and status on the states that possess them that the non-proliferation treaty, of which the UK was a founding signatory, determines two things: that the non-nuclear powers should not acquire nuclear weapons, and that the nuclear powers should “pursue negotiations in good faith on … general and complete disarmament”. Blair has unilaterally decided to rip it up.

    But in helping to wreck the treaty we are only keeping up with our friends across the water. In May the US government launched a systematic assault on the agreement. The summit in New York was supposed to strengthen it, but the US, led by John Bolton – the undersecretary for arms control (someone had a good laugh over that one) – refused even to allow the other nations to draw up an agenda for discussion. The talks collapsed, and the treaty may now be all but dead. Needless to say, Bolton has been promoted: to the post of US ambassador to the UN. Yesterday Bush pushed his nomination through by means of a “recess appointment”: an undemocratic power that allows him to override Congress when its members are on holiday.

    Bush wanted to destroy the treaty because it couldn’t be reconciled with his new plans. Last month the Senate approved an initial $4m for research into a “robust nuclear earth penetrator” (RNEP). This is a bomb with a yield about 10 times that of the Hiroshima device, designed to blow up underground bunkers that might contain weapons of mass destruction. (You’ve spotted the contradiction.) Congress rejected funding for it in November, but Bush twisted enough arms this year to get it restarted. You see what a wonderful world he inhabits when you discover that the RNEP idea was conceived in 1991 as a means of dealing with Saddam Hussein’s biological and chemical weapons. Saddam is pacing his cell, but the Bushites, like the Japanese soldiers lost in Malaysia, march on. To pursue his war against the phantom of the phantom of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, Bush has destroyed the treaty that prevents the use of real ones.

    It gets worse. Last year Congress allocated funding for something called the “reliable replacement warhead”. The government’s story is that the existing warheads might be deteriorating. When they show signs of ageing they can be dismantled and rebuilt to a “safer and more reliable” design. It’s a pretty feeble excuse for building a new generation of nukes, but it worked. The development of the new bombs probably means the US will also breach the comprehensive test ban treaty – so we can kiss goodbye to another means of preventing proliferation.

    But the biggest disaster was Bush’s meeting with Manmohan Singh a fortnight ago. India is one of three states that possess nuclear weapons and refuse to sign the non-proliferation treaty (NPT). The treaty says India should be denied access to civil nuclear materials. But on July 18 Bush announced that “as a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology, India should acquire the same benefits and advantages as other such states”. He would “work to achieve full civil nuclear energy cooperation with India” and “seek agreement from Congress to adjust US laws and policies”. Four months before the meeting the US lifted its south Asian arms embargo, selling Pakistan a fleet of F-16 aircraft, capable of a carrying a wide range of missiles, and India an anti-missile system. As a business plan, it’s hard to fault.

    Here then is how it works. If you acquire the bomb and threaten to use it you will qualify for American exceptionalism by proxy. Could there be a greater incentive for proliferation?

    The implications have not been lost on other states. “India is looking after its own national interests,” a spokesman for the Iranian government complained on Wednesday. “We cannot criticise them for this. But what the Americans are doing is a double standard. On the one hand they are depriving an NPT member from having peaceful technology, but at the same time they are cooperating with India, which is not a member of the NPT.” North Korea (and this is the only good news around at the moment) is currently in its second week of talks with the US. While the Bush administration is doing the right thing by engaging with Pyongyang, the lesson is pretty clear. You could sketch it out as a Venn diagram. If you have oil and aren’t developing a bomb (Iraq) you get invaded. If you have oil and are developing a bomb (Iran) you get threatened with invasion, but it probably won’t happen. If you don’t have oil, but have the bomb, the US representative will fly to your country and open negotiations.

    The world of George Bush’s imagination comes into being by government decree. As a result of his tail-chasing paranoia, assisted by Tony Blair’s cowardice and Manmohan Singh’s opportunism, the global restraint on the development of nuclear weapons has, in effect, been destroyed in a few months. The world could now be more vulnerable to the consequences of proliferation than it has been for 35 years. Thanks to Bush and Blair, we might not go out with a whimper after all.
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Web Site Displays Raw Uncensored Iraq War Footage See the War, After an Ad for the ArmyThis week the Web site ifilm.comintroduced a new “channel” called WarZone (www.ifilm.com/warzone) with film clips from World War II, Vietnam, Israel and Iraq. Looking at the selection of videos about Iraq, it’s hard to say which are scarier: the clips themselves or the advertisements that run with them.

Let’s start with the clips. Click on one, and first you’ll get an ad: as rain falls, a father speaks quietly to his son. “You’ve changed, man. … On the train back there, you did two things you’ve never done before … at least not at the same time. Shook my hand and looked me square in the eye. Where’d that come from?” The United States Army logo flashes on the screen.

Then it’s on to the clip you’ve chosen. From inside a car, you see a roadside bomb attack. The video, shot through the car’s windshield, begins with a speedy drive down a Baghdad road. After several seconds, there’s an orange explosion, then lots of yelling, gunfire and a shattered windshield. The written description explains that the victims of the ambush were members of a private British security firm. No one inside the car died, but one Iraqi outside did.

Next in the lineup is an Al Jazeera video of a missile attack on a British C-130 plane, as broadcast on MSNBC. It’s blurry and jumpy. You see a missile go up and then you see the wreckage. The talking heads cast doubt on the authenticity of the film.

Now it’s on to a promotional video for the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia. The clip, nearly four minutes long, shows lots of guys, presumably recruits, waving guns. Much of it is boring, since you can’t understand what they’re saying. And before you can see it, you have to pay your dues once again. A young American tells his mother, “I found someone to pay for me to go to college.” Guess who.

If you want to watch the mujahedeen attack a Mi-8 chopper, first you must listen to a young man having an earnest talk with his father at a pool table: “I’m going to be part of something that’s important.” The father is doubtful. “Good training?” The son reassures him: “It’s the Army.”

A lot of the clips that fill the gap between the commercials (the Army is just one of many advertisers) are standard stuff, though there are a few horrific videos, set to music, made by soldiers and marines. (“Celebrating death is not the exclusive domain of beheaders and Al Jazeera,” the caption on one says.)

And some of the videos from the field are pretty unusual. In what appears to be an insurgent’s movie of his own sniper attack, an American soldier is felled, gets up, and then ducks and runs behind a jeep. You hear shouting in Arabic. The caption for the clip tells you that the victim, Pfc. Stephen Tschiderer of the Army, was not killed. In fact, he tracked down the assailant, wounded him and then gave him medical care.

A heart-thumping 33-second video titled “Ambush in Iraq” was shot from a vehicle attacked while speeding through traffic. The dialogue, yelled at the driver, gives a sense of the drama: “Go go go, go go go. … Big one. Watch the VW. … More coming, more on the route.” Then, finally: “It’s all right. Everybody’s good.”

One of the disturbing things about the combat videos is that there’s generally no mention of provenance. Why not? Many of the films shot in Iraq came in anonymously, explained Roger Jackson, ifilm’s vice president for content. Although the editors at ifilm look over submissions to weed out anything too ghoulish (like beheadings), he said, “we don’t interrogate the sources.”

Some of the clips critical of the war, though not all, are stashed in a special section within the WarZone channel called “Spin Zone.” There you will find a Norwegian rap group’s attack on President Bush, “Kill Him Now,” and a clip titled simply “Rumsfeld Caught Lying.”

Other antiwar clips are tucked away even further. They’re not on WarZone and can be found only by searching for “Iraq” from ifilm’s homepage. One is a short and biting history of Saddam Hussein’s long relationship with the C.I.A., set to the tune “Thanks for the Memory.” Another is a film clip from the documentary “The Ground Truth” in which soldiers who have lost limbs during the war discuss what happened. One woman’s leg was crushed because her Humvee had no doors.

But if you like to watch the Army’s toys at work, the “Latest” section of WarZone is the place to be. There you’ll find “angel decoys” that repel heat-seeking missiles, a “bunker buster” bomb, and an F-18 Hornet fighter racing against a Formula One car. You can even watch a couple having sex in a convertible as seen by an OH-58D surveillance camera. The video lasts nine minutes.

Watching these videos, you might start to think you have stumbled into a particular demographic group. You would be right. Mr. Jackson noted that ifilm’s audience is “60 percent male; it skews young, toward the 18-to-38-year-old group; and it’s overwhelmingly North American, some 90 percent.”

It’s not just entertainment. It’s a recruitment station.