Soldiers in Iraq view troop surge as a lost
One of our most conservative listeners on controlcongress radio Linda sent me this article. We all have to be honest about what is going on in Iraq to find a solution. Please read and tell me what you think.
M-BAGHDAD, Iraq – Army 1st Lt. Antonio Hardy took a slow look around the east Baghdad neighborhood that he and his men were patrolling. He grimaced at the sound of gunshots in the distance. A machine gunner on top of a Humvee scanned the rooftops for snipers. Some of Hardy’s men wondered aloud if they’d get hit by a roadside bomb on the way back to their base.
“To be honest, it’s going to be like this for a long time to come, no matter what we do,” said Hardy, 25, of Atlanta. “I think some people in America don’t want to know about all this violence, about all the killings. The people back home are shielded from it; they get it sugar-coated.”
While senior military officials and the Bush administration say the president’s decision to send more American troops to pacify Baghdad will succeed, many of the soldiers who’re already there say it’s a lost cause.
“What is victory supposed to look like? Every time we turn around and go in a new area there’s somebody new waiting to kill us,” said Sgt. 1st Class Herbert Gill, 29, of Pulaski, Tenn., as his Humvee rumbled down a dark Baghdad highway one evening last week. “Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting for thousands of years, and we’re not going to change that overnight.”
“Once more raids start happening, they’ll (insurgents) melt away,” said Gill, who serves with the 1st Infantry Division in east Baghdad. “And then two or three months later, when we leave and say it was a success, they’ll come back.”
Soldiers interviewed across east Baghdad, home to more than half the city’s 8 million people, said the violence is so out of control that while a surge of 21,500 more American troops may momentarily suppress it, the notion that U.S. forces can bring lasting security to Iraq is misguided.
Lt. Hardy and his men of the 2nd Brigade of the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division, from Fort Carson, Colo., patrol an area southeast of Sadr City, the stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
A map in Hardy’s company headquarters charts at least 50 roadside bombs since late October, and the lieutenant recently watched in horror as the blast from one killed his Humvee’s driver and wounded two other soldiers in a spray of blood and shrapnel.
Soldiers such as Hardy must contend not only with an escalating civil war between Iraq’s Sunni and Shiite Muslims, but also with insurgents on both sides who target U.S. forces.
“We can go get into a firefight and empty out ammo, but it doesn’t accomplish much,” said Pvt. 1st Class Zach Clouser, 19, of York, Pa. “This isn’t our war – we’re just in the middle.”
Almost every foot soldier interviewed during a week of patrols on the streets and alleys of east Baghdad said that Bush’s plan would halt the bloodshed only temporarily. The soldiers cited a variety of reasons, including incompetence or corruption among Iraqi troops, the complexities of Iraq’s sectarian violence and the lack of Iraqi public support, a cornerstone of counterinsurgency warfare.
“They can keep sending more and more troops over here, but until the people here start working with us, it’s not going to change,” said Sgt. Chance Oswalt, 22, of Tulsa, Okla.
Bush’s initiative calls for American soldiers in Baghdad to take positions in outposts throughout the capital, paired up with Iraqi police and soldiers. Few of the U.S. soldiers interviewed, however, said they think Iraqi forces can operate effectively without American help.Their officers were more optimistic.
If there’s enough progress during the next four to six months, “we can look at doing provincial Iraqi control, and we can move U.S. forces to the edge of the city,” said Lt. Col. Dean Dunham, the deputy commander of the 2nd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade, which oversees most of east Baghdad.
Maj. Christopher Wendland, a senior staff officer for Dunham’s brigade, said he thinks there’s a good chance that by late 2007 American troops will have handed over most of Baghdad to Iraqi troops.
“I’m actually really positive,” said Wendland, 35, of Chicago. “We have an Iraqi army that’s actually capable of maintaining once we leave.”
If the Iraqi army can control the violence, his thinking goes, economic and political progress will follow in the safest areas, accompanied by infrastructure improvement, then spread outward.
In counterinsurgency circles, that notion is commonly called the “inkblot” approach. It’s been relatively successful in some isolated parts of Iraq, such as Tal Afar on the Syrian border, but in most areas it’s failed to halt the bloodshed for any length of time.
John take some time and read the stories here:
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/
Read the hands of God
And then take some time to read the stories of:
http://www.indcjournal.com/
These people arent spinning tales from inside the green zone. Also way too much time is spent reporting on Baghdad itself.It is not the entire country just one city.Like Katrina the news agencies concentrated on New Orleans and not the overall destruction that affected so many and yet their stories were lost.
Mike
The areas of fighting are where Sunnis and Shiites inner mix. That is why the Biden plan makes sense. You are right the majority of Iraq is peaceful in areas where each group rules itself. That is why the truth is based on where you live in Iraq.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=2203f11597
Iraqis and Americans have a common for, Radical Islam.
Not fighting between sunni and shiite.
Good to know that Westbrook can now put himself above those soldiers who provided quotes for this piece as well.
Baghdad is the “central front” if you will, and quite frankly, if the united states military and a hallowed democratically elected Iraqi government cannot manage a cease fire in the capital, then what’s the use of maintaining hope?
…perhaps so Republicans, while wrong about pretty much everything at this point in time, can at least SOUND TOUGH on an issue or two. If thousands have to die because of it…so be it.
Al,
Same old dainty liberal talk.
What’s “dainty” is the person sitting in front of your keyboard Westbrook, not half the man any of these soldiers quoted are, yet determined to believe you’re somehow twice the man they are simply because you have beliefs.
Talk is cheap. Take it from a veteran. Your unwillingness to enlist, to put your money where your mouth is, only exposes what is truly “dainty” here. Tough words, rah rah, but ask the man to help fight and he melts like ice cream.
I’m not a hawk, but at least if I was, I’d have earned the right to talk as tough as you do Westbrook. You haven’t earned it. You know you haven’t. I know you haven’t.
These soldiers are spilling their blood for your fetish. Other than words, what are you ever going to bring to the table? Dainty is a good word for what lies directly behind your words Westbrook. Interesting that your mind produced that specific word.
Freud might have a few insights that apply to you.
Al, you know as well as I do that opinions in the military are like a@#holes, everyone has one and they all stink. If you wanted, you could fing 15 soldiers to give you quote supporting ANYTHING. The one key ingredient is the progression of the Iraqi Army. If they do not remove their corruption and become fully (militarily) able to take over…we’d fail no matter what we do.
Ale,
Let’s see, let’s try this again.
Al,
Same old dainty liberal talk.
Aubrey,
You said it all. Better than I could.
Failure of the Iraqi Army to as you put it, “remove their corruption,” would mean a huge victory of radical islam in the war on terror.
Willie, anybody says anything better than you because all you know how to do is regurgitate the published ramblings of someone else, call people names and disappear when an actual question requires you to exercise your intellectual faculties.
Christy,
Did you say something?
You know better than to go outside where people can see you, not to mention hear you.
I can’t look at it in those terms. There were plenty of times when I felt like a slave, and you know to keep your mouth shut for your own sake. This is universal in the unit I served in…like the notion of speaking to a journalist and offering my personal opinion on what we were doing at the time…might as well take the rank off my collar right then and there, fire up the lawn mower and clear my calender for the next 45 days…
These soldiers have nothing to fear on the administrative side of life that compares at all to the actual horror of their job. Rank or no rank, they’re still going to be ducks on the pond and cowards like Westbrook are still going to be believing there’s hope.
The opinion offered by those who actually have to put their life on the line means a hell of a lot more than yours or my own. And while I’m under no delusion in regards to this “best and brightest” line, there’s a predisposition towards a certain belief that allows ANY OF US to disregard the words of someone in that situation.
Because if we are going to simply assume that the soldier is daft, then instead of providing benefits to veterans, why don’t we just euthanase them instead? Get it over with, and toss out this nonsense about how we respect “the troops”, care about them at all, are grateful.
If apathy is the natural response to one of them speaking up in the middle of it, then aren’t they nothing more than ground meat for the chili?
Aubrey, I figure you might have already read this, but if not, I think you’ll get a kick out of it. From Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, I transcribed it a while back…during my time in service, I photocopied a few hundred of them and over a week managed to sneak them into just about every office in the battalion and throughout brigade headquarters…solo mission…overheard chatter in the company HQ with the butter bar XO wondering if fingerprints could be pulled from them (none were left for them to find of course)…it kept me sane for a good couple of months in the runup to Kosovo:
http://deadissue.com/archives/2006/05/08/player-piano-chapter-7/
There’s no hope in this expectation being met, and it’s not even the corruption, but the sheer mickey-mouse level of discipline and competence that the iraqi Army embodies.
Here’s a comparison that makes a lot of sense I think…the US Army is to the Iraq Army what Eminem is to Kevin Federline.
They’re clowns – - – I’ve been reading exposes in the major US newspapers for a couple months now. They’re constantly late, they don’t accomplish what they’re supposed to in the time they’re supposed to. They don’t understand tactics like…”cover”, “don’t walk by that window, there’s a sniper in the building next door”, “we have two more buildings to sweep so get up off this couch, stop going through those CDs in this family’s living room, don’t steal that”…they’re as silly as a uniformed outfit gets in the ‘hired gun’ arena.
American soldiers have died because of these clowns. There are plenty of stories out there. Any expectation of the Iraqi military becoming capable is foolish.
Al,
You and I are not in dissageement here. I will say though, that I did not mean to imply that soldiers have less than average intelligence, you are not dumb and neither am I.
I did train the new Iraqi Army for abot 5 of my 16 months over there. 2 months were their basic training. My basic training lasted for three months, Iraqi basic training lasted for TWO WEEKS! After that I helped train an Iraqi battalion in Mahmoudiya (really a fun little town, mortars every day at 3 pm. kind of like 5 o’clock Charlie from MASH) and these guys were absolutley useless. They needed to be trained, and I mean intense training for a while.
Yeah, pretty much the whole success thing is based upon the Iraqis getting their butts in gear but we HAVE to train them. My buddies that are over there or have just come back say that they get trained about the same way as when I was there.
Aubrey, I think that for the reasons you’ve detailed, the ‘training’ ship has already sailed. It wasn’t done correctly, and the paycheck (as I understand it) is the primary motivation for Iraqis to sign up. Then when they get through training, most of them refuse assignments outside of their tribal preferences. Desertion rates are high, and in terms of their operational capacity, the uniform is about the only thing that qualifies most to be considered a soldier at all.
I didn’t think you were implying that the soldiers are all stupid, but I did perceive that you were disregarding their opinions and failing to take into account how providing quotes to journalists is a surefire way to catch unneeded heat from the brass.
The fact that soldiers are willing to go on the record and say what they’re saying is a breakdown of discipline that requires an explaination of some kind. It’s a phenomenon that, to me, signals just what I described above…that the mission itself is worse than anything the soldier would have to fear back at HQ.
These ARE soldiers who were broken down and built back up in basic training. They’re talking. That’s not supposed to happen.
Westbrook ignores what they have to say for his own reasons. He’s never been a soldier, so the dynamic I wrote about here, that I’ve been pining over these past few weeks, is understandably over his head…but you and I both know that for these quotes to be showing up in articles indicates a level of hopelessness throughout the ranks.
What upsets me more than anything though, is that all these ops w/in Baghdad are being run under the orders that “Iraqis are in charge”…
Then they show up late, don’t follow the stated plan, don’t respond to communications for intel, backup, etc, and are terribly unprofessional.
This has led to US soldier fatalities. I take offense to that scenario being a necessity at this point. It’s bad enough they’re in the middle of a civil war, but now that misery is compounded by having to count on these people.
That’s not “defending the Constitution of the United States” as I see it. These politicians who are saying, “the troops want to finish the mission” don’t care about one of our brothers being killed over the shortcomings of their Iraqi counterparts.
Al,
I don’t know how long you’ve been out of the Army, but man have you got it wrong. Soldiers don’t get broken down in Basic Training any more…they are asked to do pushups, they have to be convinced that parade drill is important, THEY ARE GIVIN STRESS CARDS! Soldiers know that they can get away with whatever they want because of political correctness. If a soldier speaks out (in the media) negatively about anything and is then repremanded in any way…all that soldier needs to do is give the media another call. Commanders fear that scenario and will let soldiers say whatever they want to in front of the cameras. The tight rein on the soldiers that you once knew no longer exists. The only control a leader has over soldiers is exceptional leadership ability that the soldiers “choose” to follow.