One of the things that struck me most in a recent conversation with wounded Iraqi interpreter Rabeh Morad was his description of Saddam Hussein.
"I thought that Saddam was a criminal," he said. "America was going to give us freedom, and I wanted to help with this."
Now that Morad is living in America, he said he's having a harder time seeing Iraq's former dictator in the same way as he did before.
After all, Morad told me, anyone who fought and sacrificed for Saddam -- in the Iran-Iraq war, for instance -- was treated to a generous government salary, among other benefits.
Morad, who lost both of his legs in a roadside bombing, is struggling to pay the rent on the small, tidy apartment he shares with his wife and 12-year-old daughter in West Valley City. Among other indignities, he owes the United States $90 a month for his family's airline tickets out of the Middle East -- a fee for the "privilege" of being a refugee in the United States of America.
Army reserve officer Dana Tucker, who blogs at www.danatucker.blogspot.com told me last week that his experiences working with interpreters in Iraq deepened his understanding of the disappointment Morad has felt since arriving in the U.S.
Morad, Tucker said, "is coming from a culture where those who've made such sacrifices are honored, revered, and taken care of, including financially -- the title of Martyr is one proudly held, and payments to Martyr's families are standard practice. Here in the U.S., most folks know they need to offer encouragement and support when they see or hear of wounded veterans, but our overriding inclination is to turn away, to not want to see or hear about the suffering, just as we might turn the channel when a Sally Struthers' 'feed the starving Africans' commercial comes on. So there is a jarring contrast in our approaches to dealing with suffering."
And that's assuming that Americans understand the suffering at all. Tucker's not certain his fellow citizens get it.
"The U.S. population in general is completely ignorant of the people of Iraq," Tucker lamented, "and many even direct their anger and antipathy that should be directed only at the insurgent type at all Iraqis... this pervades our society, not just in governmental policies that haven't been developed to support these folks, essentially Iraqi war veterans themselves." Tucker said that many Americans would rather here folks like Morad expressing "'appreciation for the liberation', regardless of whether that is truly deserved."

Labels: Iraq, refugees

"Voice of the people."
"The Fourth Estate."
"Essential to Democracy"
Yada, yada, yada.

The truth is, the vast majority of what journalists do doesn't make for revolutionary change. But once in a while, reporters do get to make a difference in the lives of those who need it. That was the case this week, when we reported on Rabeh Morad, an Iraqi who lost his legs while working for U.S. forces in the Iraq and fled to America -- only to find that the money he would receive from his insurance company wouldn't even cover the rent on a small apartment he shares with his wife and daughter.

The e-mails came streaming in. And quickly, a group of citizens banded together to create a donation account and help Mr. Morad and his family in other ways. Those who wish to help out can e-mail the group at helping.rabeh@gmail.com or make a donation at any Zion's Ban branch under Morad's formal, tribal name of Rabeh Al Khafagi.

Here's the story, in case you missed it (and be sure to visit the links to the two other articles in the series about Iraq's refugees.)

"Is this America?"
By Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune

Rabeh Morad removes his right leg.
And then his left.
He sets aside the prosthetics and pulls down an elastic sock, exposing a shriveled stump, just below his knee.
"This," he says, "is what I gave to America."
He's a proud man, stout in frame and loud in voice. He was a successful electronics merchant in the southern Iraqi town of Nasiriyah before answering the U.S. military's call for interpreters.
Now he's a refugee. Jobless, distraught -- sometimes suicidal -- he's struggling to pay the rent on the small, tidy apartment he shares with his wife and 12-year-old daughter in West Valley City. Along with his other bills, he owes the United States $90 a month for his family's airline ticketsout of the Middle East.
Morad, 54, is among hundreds of wounded interpreters forced to flee Iraq after being exposed as American collaborators. Many waited in other Middle Eastern nations, dreaming of the welcome they'd get once they received permission to immigrate to the United States. Dozens have completed the journey.
Now, they've found themselves in a nation not nearly so grateful as they'd imagined it would be.

'American was going to give us freedom'
Morad had picked up bits of English while working as a merchant sailor on an oil liner in the Persian Gulf. Even today, he struggles to express his thoughts in his second language, but when the U.S.-backed Coalition Provisional Authority took over Iraq after Saddam Hussein's 2003 ouster, it came with woefully few officials who spoke Arabic.
Morad's broken English was good enough for provisional government work; he was employed by the CPA for half a year.
Three years later, with violence mounting in Iraq's Shiite-dominated south, the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division needed an interpreter near the holy city of Najaf. San Diego-based Titan Corporation, which has taken in billions of dollars providing translators to the U.S. military, offered Morad the job.
"I thought Saddam was a criminal," Morad says. "America was going to give us freedom, and I wanted to help with this."
Titan paid Morad $242 a week. The Army sent him to work with Lt. Emily Perez, a recent graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Twenty-four years her senior, Morad called Perez "my beautiful child."
On Sept. 12, 2006, during a patrol near the city of Kifl, a roadside bomb -- shaped to ensure maximum lethality -- exploded below the Humvee in which Morad and Perez were passengers.
Perez was killed. Morad lost his legs.

'I always believed'
When U.S. military members lose limbs in combat they're stabilized in Iraq, evacuated as quickly as possible to the Army hospital at Landstuhl, Germany, then sent to specialized care facilities in the United States. They're provided physical therapy, job training and counseling. Some receive computerized prosthetic limbs that cost more than a house. Many heal so well that they end up back in uniform -- and some who have asked to do so have even returned to combat.
Titan's interpreters took a different route. After initially being treated at U.S. military hospitals in Iraq, most were sent to Amman, Jordan, where they lived dormitory-style in a hotel owned by a local doctor. There they awaited surgeries and -- many hoped -- a ticket to the United States. Their care was basic, their prosthetics decidedly low-tech. In most cases, they were treated only for physical injuries, not psychological wounds.
Morad spent a year in Jordan waiting for doctors to tell him he had reached "maximum medical improvement."
That's where he met Diyar al-Bayati, another interpreter who, like Morad, lost both legs in a bombing while working for the U.S. Army. Just 20 years old, al-Bayati underwent painful surgeries in Jordan while holding fast to the belief that a grander life awaited him in the United States. He figured his sacrifice would help expedite the immigration process he'd started months earlier, at the urging of the U.S. soldiers he worked alongside.
"I always believed that I would live in America," he said. But, he sadly adds, he figured he would come here with legs.
Last spring, al-Bayati finally arrived in Utah -- and by coincidence, just weeks before Morad -- but he found his service to this country counted for little when it came to accessing medical care. He's still waiting for a set of prosthetic legs. He wheels around in a simple folding wheelchair, and sometimes in a second-hand motorized chair donated by a good Samaritan.
Someday, he says, he'll return to Iraq.

'I could not go back'
It was more money than he'd ever seen, but Morad knew he was getting a bad deal when a representative from Titan's insurance company, AIG, offered him $112,000 in compensation shortly before he was discharged from the Jordan hospital. Settlement documents, written in Arabic and English, said that amount "adequately covers the cost of any necessary future medical treatment."
Morad disagreed. He wanted to immigrate to the United States and knew the costs of medical care would be high. "But the man told me 'You are old, so this is all you will get.' "
Morad signed the contract. "There were some who refused to sign, and they were sent back to Iraq," he said. Officials who have worked with injured interpreters have confirmed that the men were often pressured to sign settlements they deemed insufficient, under threat that they would be dropped off at Iraq's border if they refused.
At that time, about 250 of Titan's interpreters had been killed in Iraq -- many executed in retribution for cooperating with U.S. forces. And when insurgents couldn't get to the interpreters themselves, they went after their families.
"Of course, I could not go back," Morad said.
While disappointed, he figured he could use the settlement to start a small business in the U.S. -- creating a job that would keep him on his feet for only a few minutes at a time, which is as long as he can stand.
Morad arrived in America last spring. But he never got the lump sum he expected.
Instead, he receives a check for $344 every two weeks. That and the limited money he receives as a refugee -- money that is about to run out -- pays his rent and little more. At the rate he's being paid, it will take Morad 13 years to receive all the money in his settlement.

'Really disgraceful'
AIG declined to comment on how it compensates in jured Iraqi interpreters. But officials familiar with the system say the benefits are dictated by the policies purchased by Titan and other defense contractors.
Most companies buy the minimum amount of coverage required by the Defense Base Act for contractors operating alongside the military. The 67-year-old law ties compensation to a contractor's wages -- not to the cost of their future care or living expenses.
Still, California Rep. Henry Waxman is confident that insurers can and should do more. During a May hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which he chairs, Waxman complained that insurance companies have pocketed extravagant profits while the American taxpayer -- who foots the cost of defense contracts -- gets stuck with the bill. In one case, he noted, AIG was paid $284 million to cover contractors employed by the defense company KBR. Of that amount, just $73 million went to injured contractors.
Meanwhile, the injured "have to fight the insurance company to get their benefits," Waxman said. "Delays and denials in paying claims are the rule."
He called the situation "really disgraceful."
Rick Kiernan chose a different word. "It's disappointing," said the former Army colonel, a spokesman for L-3 Communications Corporation, which purchased Titan in 2005 and now supplies about 20 percent of the interpreters who work with the U.S. military in Iraq.
Kiernan called the Iraqi interpreters "very, very brave men and women," but said that did not entitle them to anything more than what was in their hiring contract. "This is the contractual arrangement they made," he said.
He said that if L-3 was to go above and beyond the basic limits of the DBA, it would come at an additional cost to the government.

'They're not like any other refugee'
Colleen Driscoll first met Morad in the intensive care unit of the U.S. Army's 28th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad.
Driscoll, a former L-3 benefits manager, told Morad she would take care of him. But she said she knew that L-3 wasn't interested in providing anything more than basic care. She recalled asking John Miller, then-president of Titan's linguist division, whether she might be reimbursed for clothing and small gifts she had brought the wounded interpreters.
"He said, 'Sure, but remember we're not Santa Claus,' " Driscoll said.
That summed up L-3's approach, Driscoll said. "The company just wasn't doing enough."
Driscoll left L-3 in 2007 and has since founded the Injured Allies Fund, which helps wounded Iraqis in the U.S. pay for continued medical treatment. She's spent much of her savings and has even brought a wounded interpreter into her Colorado home. She wonders why others don't do more.
"In my eyes they're heroes," she said. "They're not like any other refugee. They have very serious injuries, and they need continued medical care."
Many, she adds, "are suffering from very serious post traumatic stress, and they're just not being treated for that."
The U.S. military estimates that about one in five veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan needs treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. By contrast, AIG has approved fewer than 1 percent of the injured workers it covers for PTSD treatment.
Kiernan, the L-3 spokesman, said he didn't know what more his company could do about the plight of its former contractors. He suggested that wounded interpreters might find help through the U.S. military members they worked alongside.

'Must I beg?'
Morad takes pride in speaking about the man he used to be in Iraq. "I had a nice, big house," he says. "I could get for my family whatever they want."
Here, when he needed clothing and blankets for his family -- which is shivering through its first Utah winter -- he says he was told to visit a second-hand shop. It was humbling, but he did it.
When Morad complained that he could not find a job and needed money to pay his bills, he said a state worker suggested he go wait outside a church or mosque and beg for money. But that was too much for his pride to bear.
"To ask for money like some poor man?" he asks, his eyes redden and fill with tears. "I need help, yes. I am poor now, yes. But must I beg? Is this America? Is this what I gave my legs for?"
Morad drops his head into hands. "Sometimes I think that suicide is good for me," he cries.
He wipes his tears away, sits up and takes a deep breath. He gazes sadly across the room at his daughter, who flashes her father an encouraging smile.
"I just wanted to give her everything I could," Morad says. "That's what I wanted to do."

Labels: Iraq, refugees

Following a 2007 in which 17 service members from Utah were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Beehive State lost two military men in 2008, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.

While the losses of Jeffrey Ammon and Jordan Thibeault are significant to their families, friends and communities, the drop in U.S. casualties -- primarily due to a precipitous reduction in violence in Iraq -- is good news in the United States.

Still, the war zones remain extremely dangerous places. In Iraq, scores of Iraqis are still dying each month in bomb attacks. In Afghanistan, Taliban rebels control more territory at the onset of 2009 than they did at the start of 2008.

Meanwhile, in many of the various "Top Ten" type lists that news gathering groups put out to close out the year, a very small number (including our own, here at The Trib) seem to have remembered to mention that the United States remains a country at war on two fronts.

There is absolutely nothing good about war casualties. But at least Americans bother to pay attention when dead and wounded service members are coming home in droves.

Labels: Afghanistan, Iraq, The Fallen

It wasn't hard to find a local angle to the story of six Blackwater security contractors who had been indicted on charges of manslaughter in the 2007 slaying of at least 14 unarmed civilians in Baghdad. After all, one of the accused men was a former Marine from Utah -- and all had chosen to surrender to authorities right here at the Salt Lake City federal courthouse.

While there was no question that our newspaper would be covering Monday's "Big Story," we still had one problem: How do we distinguish our reporting from the rest of what would be out there? After all, every journalist in the country would have the same access to the press conferences, court hearings and prosecutorial documents that we would have.

Normally, I'm not a fan of "flood the zone" coverage -- where newspaper editors throw hoards of reporters at a story in the hopes that someone will come up with something unique. But today (and not just because my annual review is coming up) I'll give credit to my supervisor, Sheila McCann, who kept tabs on what everyone was doing and maintained a steady (and, where needed, flexible) vision of where we were headed.

Starting on Saturday, when word came that indictments were coming and a Utah man had been implicated, a number of Tribune reporters began working the phones. By Monday morning, their hard work had connected us to family members and defense attorneys. That head start gave me and McCann the opportunity, on Monday morning, to sit down and talk about where we were going with the story.

We knew that by the time our newspaper hit newsstands Tuesday morning that most of our readers would already know the basics of the story, having read about it online or seen it on TV or heard about it on the radio. What we could offer them on Tuesday was context.

And when we heard that a man outside the court had screamed "baby killers" as the indicted men were turning themselves in, we knew what that context would be.

Indeed, the charges were horrifying: Men, women and children shot dead in middle of the street, in the middle of the day. But how would we reconcile that brutal scene with what we were learning about the accused men? Utah's Donald Ball, for example, was an Eagle Scout and an honorably discharged Marine who, by all accounts, was a decent, compassionate guy who had used his Blackwater paychecks to buy his mother a home in the Salt Lake suburbs.

Thanks to the hard work of several Tribune reporters, who scoured high school year books and tracked down Ball's friends, family members and co-workers we had a lot of details about Ball's life. And thanks to the meticulous investigation of the shootings at Baghdad's Nissor Square, we had a detailed account of what allegedly occurred on that deadly day.

All that was left was to put it all together.

Here's what we wrote:

Dueling pictures of ex-Utah Marine emerge
By Matthew D. LaPlante, Julia Lyon, Nate Carlisle, Jason Bergreen and Lindsay Whitehurst.
The Salt Lake Tribune

Baghdad was beginning to come back to life -- and on Sept. 16, 2007, the traffic in the intersection at Nisoor Square was showing it. Converging in vehicles, bicycles and on foot were parents and children, students on their way to school, professionals and day laborers.

Within moments, at least 14 of them would be dead. More injured. One man was shot in the chest as he stood with his hands above his head. Several were killed while attempting to flee a sudden eruption of gunfire and grenade explosions.

It was the type of scene that Iraqis have come to know all too well. This time, however, the attack came not from terrorists, insurgents or rebel militiamen -- but from Americans.

An indictment filed Monday alleges that a former Marine from Utah, Donald Ball, and five other security contractors shared criminal responsibility for the massacre at Nisoor Square. Ball and four of the other accused men surrendered to authorities at the federal courthouse in Salt Lake City. A sixth pleaded guilty on Friday.

Prosecutors are calling the attack "a shocking violation of human rights." And that is hardly the most damning of what has been said. As three of the men entered court on Monday morning, a man from across the street yelled, "baby killers."
But to those who knew him, Ball was not a mercenary or a monster. Much to the contrary. Now, between Eagle Scout and accused killer, there remains much to reconcile.

With honorable intentions »
The men charged Monday are honorably discharged soldiers and Marines. As security contractors they returned to Iraq to do a job -- a job made necessary at a time when the U.S. military was stretched precariously thin.

They are, according to family members and friends, tough men who made a split-second decision in an impossible situation.

Those who have known him, both before and after the attack at Nisoor Square, have called Ball a kind, compassionate and humble human being. He was an Eagle Scout who joined the Marines shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, accepting what he saw as honorable work in tribute to his father, who had died of a heart attack two years prior.

"He always wanted to do something that would make his father proud," said Ball's mother, Karen.

After three tours of duty in Iraq with the Marines, Ball found a job with security contractor Blackwater Worldwide -- a role that would bring him back to Iraq with a much larger salary than he'd gotten from the Marines. Using his first paychecks and his military savings, he purchased a home in West Valley City for his widowed mother.

The money was good, Karen Ball acknowledged, but that was not the only reason her son went back to work in Iraq. "He felt as though he had more to contribute," she said.

"You cannot have had an intimate conversation with my brother … and conclude that he would have done anything, anything at all, other than out of love and defense of those people," said Ball's older brother, Troy.

"I'd have him on my side at any time," said Angie Oldham, who works with Ball as a security officer at the Salt Lake City Justice Courts building and is his classmate at Salt Lake Community College's police academy, from where he is scheduled to graduate later this month. Under court order, Ball will be permitted to carry a gun while training and working, but will have to turn in his sidearm at the end of each shift.

David Attridge, Ball's academy supervisor, said he has had a number of conversations with Ball about what occurred at Nisoor Square, and "he's been pretty adamant in stating that they didn't fire until they were fired upon."

That is not, however, what investigators have concluded.

When hell broke loose »
In a meticulous probe that took the FBI and others more than a year to complete and involved hundreds of witness interviews, investigators resolved that none of the victims were armed. They also found fault in the explanation, maintained by Blackwater and being employed by defense attorneys for the accused men, that the contractors had come under attack and were fighting for their lives.

"While there were dangers in Baghdad in 2007, there were also ordinary people going about their lives," said Pat Rowan, assistant attorney general for national security. In Nisoor Square, Rowan said, the decisions of a small number of men cost many innocent people their lives. It also brought to international light the brutal tactics being used by some security contractors that many Iraqis had been complaining about for years.

Mahdi Abdul-Khudor, who lost an eye in the incident, said he hoped the court would punish the contractors. "This matter makes me happy, and I hope they will receive a just penalty," Khudor said. "They took my eye, the better part of me. I hope the court will give me justice."

Khalid Ibrahim said his father, Ibrahim Abid, a 78-year-old gardener, was killed when he was caught in the shooting while driving home. Ibrahim said his mother was overwhelmed by grief and died six months later.

"The indictment of the Blackwater members is good news for us because the killers must pay for their crime against innocent civilians," he said.

The incident that claimed Ibrahim Abid's life began as a Blackwater convoy of four heavily-armed vehicles known as "Raven 23" left Baghdad's Green Zone -- allegedly without permission from military officials -- in response to a roadside bomb attack on another Blackwater convoy. Before Raven 23 could get there, however, it was slowed by traffic in Nisoor Square.

As the convoy began to pull around the traffic, investigators believe, a white Kia sedan pulled close to one of the contractor's trucks. Prosecutors say there is no way the driver of the Kia should have been mistaken for a threat, but one of the contractors nonetheless fired his assault rifle into the sedan, killing its driver and passenger.

And that, prosecutors say, is when hell broke loose.

Death without warning »
The first victim was Ahmed Haitham Ahmed, a 20-year-old medical student who was shot in the head, apparently with no warning. Next to die was his 46-year-old mother, Mahassin Mohssen Kadhum, whose body was riddled by American bullets, according to U.S. investigators.

Also dead was Ali Khalil Abdul, a 54-year-old blacksmith who was shot in the chest while driving his motorcycle. Car dealer Osama Fadhil Abbas was killed as he stepped from his truck. Taxi driver Mahdi Sahib Nasir died when he was shot in the side.

In a Monday press conference, prosecutors noted that one man had been shot even as he held his arms above his head in surrender. And a grenade allegedly launched by the contractors had found its way into a nearby girls' school.
Prosecutors allege that there had been "no attempt to provide reasonable warnings" to those who came under attack.

"Iraqi citizens were going to lunch, stopping at the market, traveling with their families and children," said Joseph Persichini Jr., FBI assistant director-in-charge at the bureau's Washington Field Office, which led the investigation. "The individuals charged today displayed a blatant disregard for the core values of the United States Constitution and failed to adhere to the rule of law and the respect for human life."

In the heat of passion »
There is little, yet, with which to reconcile the dueling emerging pictures of Ball and the other defendants.

In court Monday afternoon, attorneys noted that Ball and two others suffered from post-traumatic stress as a result of earlier combat tours in Iraq -- though no specific motive has been alleged other than as an explanation for the charge of manslaughter, rather than murder.

"The charge that we've levied… is voluntary manslaughter," Rowan explained. "This is an unlawful killing upon sudden quarrel or heat of passion."

Inherent in that charge, Rowan said, was an acknowledgement that "there may be mitigating circumstances surrounding the offense … that the offense occurred in a difficult situation."

"We take no pleasure in charging individuals whose job was to protect Americans," added Jeffrey Taylor, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

But, the prosecutors said, none of that excuses what happened in Nisoor Square.

As such, Persichini said, the accused men "must be held accountable for their actions, not just for the integrity of the American people but for the Iraqi men, women and children whose lives have been destroyed."

But for some the answers are not so simple as finding someone to blame.

A deadly balance »
Slipping into the back of the courtroom on Monday afternoon was a tall woman with curly blond hair and a solemn expression on her face.

Carol Thomas Young did not know Ball or any of the other defendants. She does not know what happened in Nisoor Square. But perhaps more than anyone in the courtroom, Young understands the life and death decisions that security contractors in Iraq are forced to make.

It has been three and a half years since Young's son, 27-year-old security contractor Brandon Thomas, was killed in Baghdad when a suicide car bomber plowed into his truck in a crowded Baghdad intersection. And not a week goes by in which Young doesn't question whether her son's life might have been spared if different decisions had been made on that day.

Young said her son sometimes complained about the posture taken by some of Blackwater's contractors.

"They had tactics that were a little more aggressive than what he thought was best," she said. "But what can I say about that? He was killed and they came home."

Young was saddened by what is already being said about the accused contractors. She winces at words like "mercenary" and sighs over those whose verdict, long before a jury hears the case, is "baby killer."

She knows that some would express similar sentiments about her son, too.

"I don't know what happened in this case," said Thomas Young, a former U.S. marshal who acknowledged the possibility that the men may indeed have acted criminally. "But I know the men who do this work. They don't go over there looking to stir up trouble. Trouble finds them."

And sometimes, she said, it costs them their lives.

Labels: Iraq, journalism

Remember when President George W. Bush said he wouldn't tie his hands in Iraq by agreeing to a timeline for withdrawal? Well, this week, the Bush administration and the Iraqi government have agreed on a timeline for withdrawal.

Of course, Bush's hands are not the hands that will be tied by the agreement. Bush's hands will be busy clearing brush at his Crawford ranch and writing books at his new Dallas home as President Barack Obama deals with the mess his predecessor left in Iraq.

For his part, Obama has welcomed the agreement, which generally coincides with the plan he's been touting for several years. But it's worth noting that Bush was unwilling to bequeath to his successor the same kind of flexibility, in dealing with the ever-changing situation in Iraq, that he demanded during his second term in office. As you may recall, Bush even vetoed war funding measures that included a withdrawal timeline.

The good news is that, under the agreement, U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. The bad news is that may not be the best situation for Iraq, its neighbors, or the United States of America.

Labels: Bush, Iraq, Obama

I visited the studios of KUER's RadioWest for Veteran's Day to discuss the locally-produced Reserved To Fight-- a heartbreaking documentary about the homecomings of four U.S. Marines from Utah.

First things first, Reserved is an absolute must-see for anyone who wants to get a grunts-eye-view of the war after the war. (That should include anyone who claims to "support the troops.") As I wrote last week, "just paying attention is the single most important honor we can render to those who fight this nation's battles."

You can find out more about Reserved, including show times, here.

During the show, host Doug Fabrizio asked me about what the United States commits itself to when it goes to war. I told him that in addition to the tremendous sacrifice of blood and treasure, it was important for us to remember that we make a separate moral purchase: the cost of the lifelong well-being of every single service member who fought for our "grateful" nation.

Truth is, though, that our nation has a pretty ugly track record when it comes to taking care of those who fight its battles. And Exhibit A, today, is a new federal report that concludes that about a quarter of the 700,000 veterans who served during the 1990-1991 Gulf War suffer from Gulf War illness.

That's a striking number, in part, because the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs spent years denying that the condition even existed, even as tens of thousands of service members suffered from a variety of symptoms, including memory and concentration problems, chronic headaches, widespread pain, gastrointestinal problems, and other chronic abnormalities.

Now, nearly two full decades after the end of that war, a federal report states that "scientific evidence leaves no question that Gulf War illness is a real condition with real causes and serious consequences for affected veterans."

Vietnam War vets know this story. It took them years to get the federal government to recognize that the ailments they were suffering from exposure to Agent Orange were real. Cold War veterans know this game, too -- they were told for years that exposure to nuclear radiation during atomic test explosions wouldn't make them sick.

Do today's wars have a similar ailment that is being overlooked (hidden?) by those charged with caring for our nation's warriors? You can make a pretty safe bet it is so.

Sadly, the message we keep giving our veterans -- and one that is projected, loud and clear, throughout Reserved -- is just five words long:

"You are on your own."

Labels: Afghanistan, Coming Home, Iraq, veterans

Now that blue is the new red, here are two words you're unlikely to hear from Democrats in Congress:

War Tax.

Back when Americans ranked the dismal situation in Iraq as a greater priority for the next president than the flagging economy, senior Dems including David Obey, John Murtha and Jim McGovern, in an effort to make an unpopular war even more unpopular, proposed a 15 percent "war surcharge" to pay for ongoing combat operations and keep up with the demand for veterans services back home.

"If you don't like the cost, then shut down the war," Obey said, just over one year ago.

If it were sincere, it would be a noble idea: Draft all Americans into the war effort by making them pay for it, right then and there. No killing on credit. No making our children pay for our bloody adventures.

If made permanent, a war tax would force future politicians (like Murtha, who voted in favor of the resolution allowing President Bush to commit troops to Iraq) to think long and hard about new military expeditions. And it would allow our nation to keep the best parts of an all-volunteer force while ensuring that those fortunate sons not serving in uniform would be contributing in treasure, if not in blood, whenever we decided to start shooting.

Perhaps most importantly, it would force more Americans to pay attention to how their money is being spent. And far greater than the parades and the flags, far greater than the bumper stickers and the care packages, far greater than the expression of any personal feelings about the rightness or wrongness of any given war, just paying attention is the single most important honor we can render to those who fight this nation's battles.

But it's an honor that so very often falls short -- perhaps because most Americans simply do not feel as though they have a stake in the fights being waged under their flag.

A war tax would change that.

It wasn't just anti-war Democrats who were behind such a bill. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a strident supporter of the war effort in Iraq, also supported a surcharge.

"People keep saying we're not asking a sacrifice of anybody but our military in this war," Lieberman said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in early 2007. "I think we have to start thinking about a war on terrorism tax."

That would be good news for any Democrats looking to resurrect the war tax effort, because the independent Lieberman (who caucuses with his former party but often opposes them on national defense issues) would be an important voice and a crucial vote for Dems seeking a veto-proof senatorial majority.

It would be good news, but it's not. Because now that the Democrats are in power, they're likely to forget all about a proposal that McGovern once said was important because "George Bush has gotten away with paying for this war on our credit card."

Of course, that was back before Democrats had such dominant control of both chambers of Congress -- and back when the man in the Oval Office held a pen that would most certainly veto any successful war tax bill. That was back before Sen. Barack Obama began selling a tax cut for middle-class Americans. That was back when it was perfectly safe for Democrats to float such a revolutionarily democratic idea.

That was back before McGovern and his Democratic allies were in such a substantial position to actually do something about that credit card bill.

There is an immeasurable liberty in powerlessness -- one that Democrats have exploited to no end over the past few years. Now that they are the ones in control, it will be interesting to see what words were just words and what words they actually meant.

And when it comes to a war tax, I'm betting I'll get to keep my 15 percent.

Labels: Iraq, politics

I feel like I'm living in Bizarro World, a planet from the Superman comics ruled by the very simple code: "Us do opposite of all Earthly things!"

In Bizarro World, for instance, I'd actually want to check the daily status of the 401k I've been dutifully plugging money into -- since it's been losing money at such a splendidly feverish pace! In Bizarro World, I'd like German industrial heavy metal music. In Bizarro World, this wouldn't be election season, and I wouldn't be addicted to the RealClearPolitics Electorial College Map, Fivethirtyeight.com's pollster ratings, or Politico's lively stable of bloggers.

In Bizarro World, up is down, left is right, and we'd all agree that the surge in Iraq worked like a charm!

Ah! There it is -- the transuniversal portal of my current affliction: The surge. Or rather, the current way that strategy, and its proponents, have been deified by pundits like Michael Gerson.

In today's Washington Post, Gerson calls Republican presidential nominee John McCain "a vindicated prophet" who was "gloriously right" about the need for more troops in Iraq when violence dropped dramatically after the implementation of the surge strategy, which injected about 20,000 more U.S. troops into Iraq.

"After early challenges, the positive results have become undeniable," Gerson writes. "As violence in Iraq has plummeted, normality has returned to markets, and neighbors and political accommodations have moved forward."

Gerson's certainly not the only person to suggest this. It has, of course, become a matter of conventional consensus. And it's a convenient one, albeit one lacking a stable evidentiary support structure.

Let's set aside, for a moment, the fact Iraq is still in the midst of a very serious security crisis, in which civilians continue to die at a rate of about 500 a month (the population-adjusted equivalent of about 5,000 Americans a month, or 60,000 Americans a year, being wiped out in religiously-motivated executions, mass bombings, attacks on police stations and, of course, the occasional beheading.) In Bizarro World, this would be "security." And to read Gerson and many others, you'd think it was.

On this planet, of course, that's not security. It is an improvement -- and a stunning improvement at that -- but it's not security.

And on this planet, correlation is not causation. In other words: Just because it rained the last two Tuesdays you won five bucks on a scratcher ticket doesn't mean that you'll win again if it rains this Tuesday.

But in Bizarro World, that's exactly what would happen. You'd win the next time it rains on a Tuesday. And next time. And the time after that. (You'd be unhappy about this, of course, but you'd keep playing anyway, because that's what happens in Bizarro World.)

In absence of anything else having occurred in Iraq, over the past year, you might reasonably conclude that the surge did exactly what Gerson said it has. But, of course, the surge was not the only thing that happened in Iraq over the past year. And most notably, three other things happened:

1) Influential Shiite cleric Muqtadda al-Sadr called a cease-fire for all members of his powerful Mehdi Army militia, ordering it to cease attacks against Shiite rivals, Sunni enemies and even U.S. and other coalition forces.

2) After years of careful negotiations on the part of U.S. forces in the Sunni-dominated Anbar Province and years of indiscriminant killing there on the part of Al Qaida-allied insurgents, a wave of Sunni leaders turned against foreign operatives and (with their palms heavily greased with American greenbacks) allied with U.S. forces.

3) Following a years-long civil war in which tens of thousands died in (and several million fled from) the brutal sectarian violence, much of Iraq was fractionized into religious enclaves, separated by geographic and manmade barriers. Like Crips and Bloods in the Los Angeles ganglands of the 1980s, Shiites and Sunnis quickly came to know which neighborhoods they were welcome in and which they were not. (There is some evidence that some of these cold enclaves are beginning to thaw -- a good sign, perhaps, that some Iraqis are prepared to return to the relatively tolerant multi-secular society they have lived in for generations.)

Why are so many people content to set aside these facts for the more convenient equation of "surge = success"?

Let's face it, Americans tend to see the world through red-white-and-blue-tinted glasses. After years of flipping past the news on Iraq, President Bush's announcement of the surge strategy got (some) Americans thinking about that war again. So, in many eyes, the only thing that did happen in Iraq, over the past year, involved other Americans. The surge arrived. Violence was quelled. Hooray for the U.S. of A.

Politicians, meanwhile, tend to prefer black-and-white-tinted shades. Politics is about taking credit for everything you can -- and you have to do it in a sentence or less, otherwise it doesn't work for TV. So, for McCain to score points, he can't simply say that the surge helped -- he has to say it was everything.

In this world, there's simply little room for trigonometric equations.

And that's likely why the normally professorial Barack Obama, (who despite how he describes it now, did indeed oppose the surge in no uncertain terms,) can't seem to bring himself to argue the point when confronted on the topic, as he was on Bill O'Reilly's show on Fox News a few weeks ago.

I'm all for giving credit where it's due. And there is absolutely no reason to think that the surge wasn't at least partially -- and maybe significantly -- responsible for helping maintain the growing security that has been realized in Iraq over the past year. As such, U.S. and coalition forces -- not just those who fought during the surge, but all who laid the groundwork for it in the incredibly violent years before -- deserve recognition for the role they played in helping bring violence down.

And to the extent that McCain -- along with many others -- had long suggested that the United States needed to send more troops to Iraq, a certain amount of political credit is due there, too.

But unless he also predicted (and I somehow missed) the significant ways in which Iraq would change in other ways over the past year, a prophet he's not.

Except, perhaps, in Bizarro World.

Labels: Iraq, politics

A little over a year ago, talk radio's family advice guru, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, was in town to chat with some military families at Fort Douglas. In an interview before her talk, I asked Schlessinger about her most common words of advice for military spouses.

"I don't want to hear any whining -- that's my message to them," Schlessinger told me.

Schlessinger noted that soldiers at war (her son, among them) face death, injury, fear and loneliness -- to an extent that is simply incomparable to problems back home.

"He could come back without arms, legs or eyeballs, and you're bitching?" Schlessinger said before taking the stage at the base theater to host her daily program on ethics, morals and values. "You're not dodging bullets!"

If you pay attention to this blog, you know the rest of the story: Some of Schlessinger's fans took offense at the good doctor's 1,000 mg prescription of tough love. A few days later, she wrote in her blog that her words had been taken "out of context." A few days after that, she went on Fox News to explain what she meant -- and I got called to the carpet by Fox's Bill O'Reilly. (Sweet!)

Said O'Reilly to Dr. Laura about yours truly: "This man is an ideologue who's out to hurt you, and he shouldn't be working in any major newspaper!" (Double Sweet!)

At the crux of the controversy -- and I use that word lightly, 'cause we're not talking Iran-Contra here -- was a question about Schlessinger's intent. I reported her words: "stop complaining." She insisted that I missed her meaning: "complain all you want -- just not to your husband when he's away at war."

For the record, I take Schlessinger at her word. That's certainly not what she said, but there's no reason to think that's not what she meant. And after all, what kind of heartless jerk would tell the wife of a forward-deployed soldier not to complain at all?

Will Bowen, that's who.

Except Bowen's not a heartless jerk at all. Rather, he's the very reasonable, compassionate pastor of Christ Church United in Kansas City, Missouri. A few weeks ago, my wife brought home Bowen's book A Complaint Free World. The bestseller challenges readers to go 21 days without complaining -- about anything.

Bowen's challenge is hard enough task for those of us living average, ordinary lives. But what about those whose challenges are so much greater? Those with a spouse at war, for instance? For those folks, isn't a little bit of bitching healthy?

Bowen says no.

"What do you benefit from complaining?" Bowen asked me this afternoon. "You think you'll feel better, but what you're really doing is exasperating the negativity."

I wasn't convinced. Surely, some complaining is OK, right?

The Christian pastor took a Buddhist approach.

"Everyone is trying to reach enlightenment," he said. "What is enlightenment? It's being at peace with what is."

"I guess that all depends on what the definition of 'is' is," I said, conjuring my best Bill Clinton. Maybe it was the mobile phone connection or maybe it was my delivery, but Bowen didn't laugh.

OK, so how was it I came to be trying out jokes on Will Bowen this afternoon? And what does this have to do with Dr. Laura?

Two words: Jennie Taylor.

Taylor, the wife of a Utah National Guard soldier and mother of two toddlers, is the family readiness group leader for the 116th Security Forces -- a job that made her the home-front face of a unit that arrived in Iraq during one of the deadliest months since the war began, more than five years ago.

I ran into Taylor a lot while her husband was deployed -- and I never heard her complain once. Not when she learned that her husband's unit had been tasked with one of the most dangerous jobs in Iraq. Not when her husband was wounded in a roadside bomb attack. And not even when, with two months to go on his original one-year tour of duty, Brent Taylor called his wife to tell her that he wanted to stay in Iraq, because the Army was stretched thin.

Bowen's entire movement is based on helping people stop complaining -- but he told me that he was still impressed.

People like Taylor, he said, "are the lights of inspiration for all of us to follow."

Hmm.

Maybe Schlessinger was right to begin with -- even if she didn't intend to be. Maybe the best thing for military spouses is to just stop complaining. Not just to their spouses, but to everyone.

If Jennie Taylor can do it, can't they?

And it they can, can't we all?

Count me among the inspired. My name is Matthew D. LaPlante, and I'm a bitchaholic. It's been 8 hours since my last complaint...

Just 496 to go.


'Stronger than a Spartan'
History is wrong: Military marriages, Jennie Taylor says, can make better soldiers
By Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune

She's a red-headed dervish. Changing diapers. Checking e-mails on her Blackberry. Making dinner. Taking calls. Soothing cries.

"I want daddy," a little one sobs.

Jennie Taylor glances up at the computer screen. A slideshow flashes through photos of her husband in Iraq. In this one, he's wearing body armor, carrying a rifle and wearing a red Santa hat.

The photo is from last Christmas. He'd already been gone eight months at that point. Now Taylor and her kids are on their way to a Halloween party.

The 116th Security Forces deployed to Iraq during the incredibly violent spring of 2007. The Utah National Guard unit returned home in April - all, that is, except for 27 members who, along with Taylor's husband, answered a call to stay in Iraq.

Through it all, Taylor remained the resolutely chipper public face of the unit. As the 116th family readiness group leader, she arranged holiday parties for family members and organized drives to collect educational and humanitarian supplies for Iraqi civilians. She was the first call for distressed wives and mothers. She even coordinated the welcome home celebration for the soldiers that returned as scheduled, though her husband wasn't among them.

She smiled the whole time.

Now, her long race is almost over.

Another Christmastime photo of her husband pops onto the screen. Taylor sighs.

"I want daddy, too," she says.

"Always the plan."
Don't pity her. She hates that. This is what she signed up for. Every midnight worry. Every child's cry. Every exhausted moment.

Brent Taylor asked his future wife to marry him on a Saturday. The following Tuesday they walked into a National Guard recruiter's office in Draper, holding hands. There was no question about what was ahead.

"This was always the plan," Jennie Taylor says. "He always knew that the military was a family decision. I always knew what I'd agreed to."

She's not impressed by stickers, car magnets and slogans. That's not patriotism.

"If you're going to say 'God Bless America,' you gotta be willing to pay the price," Taylor says. "This is our price."

Taylor is driven by something she learned while teaching high school history. In the ancient warrior city-state of Sparta, men weren't permitted to live with their wives and children until they'd served more than a decade in the military.

"Women and children were a liability," Taylor says. "It makes sense. Who wants a soldier in the field distracted by the problems of home?"

From the moment her husband's unit left, Taylor has been determined to turn that historic detail on its ear. "We've adopted this saying, 'stronger than a Spartan,' " she says. "As odd as it sounds, my husband is a better soldier because he left a wife and two kids behind."

"I was so angry."
Not that it's been easy.

The month that the 116th arrived in Iraq was one of the deadliest on record for U.S. forces there. One hundred and thirty-one U.S. and allied service members were killed in Iraq that month - the overwhelming majority in roadside bomb attacks. The 116th was tasked to provide convoy security, escorting military and civilian vehicles on the bomb-laden roads of northern Iraq.

Within the first few days of the deployment, a soldier from a sister unit was killed. By the end of the first few weeks, dozens had been the victims of roadside bomb attacks, and several had been wounded. Brent Taylor was among the soldiers who received a Purple Heart for wounds received in a roadside bombing. He didn't tell his wife.

Jennie Taylor learned her husband had been injured while reviewing some paperwork she was helping him prepare for a promotion. "I was so angry," she remembered. "I said, 'So, the Purple Heart, huh? Did you think that might be something you were going to mention at some point?' "

But that surprise had nothing on what came in January.

"You can't stop here."
It was midmorning in Utah, late evening in Iraq, when Brent Taylor called.

"I don't think I'm done here," he told his wife.

Taylor was at her mother's home in North Ogden. She fell to her knees and buried her face into her hands. He was supposed to be home in just two months.

"It was like getting punched in the stomach," she said, "like running a 10K, getting to the end and then being told, 'you can't stop here, you have to run a marathon.' "

Violence was down. The surge was ending. But stability in Iraq was tenuous - and the Army was stretched thin.

"They need people to stay," the soldier continued.

Taylor's thoughts turned to the other parents, spouses and children who soon would be getting calls like this one. They would need her to be strong.

"OK," she said. "Who else is staying with you?"

Brent Taylor says he wouldn't have stayed in Iraq if his wife had objected. And he knows that she knows that, too.

"There's no way I could have done it if she didn't support me," says Taylor, who is finally due home this week. "She wasn't excited about it, but I knew she was supportive."

"We got us into this."
There are days when it all seems like too much to handle.

"There are days when I ask, 'What about our kids? What about our marriage? What about our lives?' " Taylor says. "I've gotten to the point where I think, 'What on Earth have we gotten ourselves into?' But you know what? It was us. We got us into this."

And so she won't complain. "When I do," she says, "I always regret it."

Kristen Ashworth said she can't remember hearing her sister-in-law and close friend utter a single complaint the whole time Brent Taylor has been away.

"Jennie just says, 'I don't expect anyone to understand, but we both feel it is the right thing to do,' " Ashworth said.

"It's not always easy for her, but she's the strongest person I know."

Labels: Iraq, lessons, military families, Utah National Guard

At the U.S. military's Camp Duke, near the Shiite holy city of Najaf, in 2005, photographer Rick Egan and I were treated to a tour of a local ammunition dump.

The idea was to show us what a great job the U.S. Army was doing at securing the site -- and indeed, it appeared to be so.

But the larger picture that Rick and I walked away with on that day was the idea that it would be many years before the U.S. military could get out of Iraq. (At the time, many were pining for a quick withdrawal, while even those who said we should stay were indicating that it would not be long before the war would be won -- "When the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," was one of President Bush's famous lines.)

The truth, it seemed clear at that depot, was that the U.S. military was essentially stuck -- no matter how the brutal fight against Iraq's insurgency was going.

The ammo dump we toured was miles wide and miles long, and included rockets, grenades, mortars, aerial bombs and missiles (and even the shells of a few old Scuds.) It was clear that it could take decades to dispose of it all (if it was even possible to do so.) And in the meantime, this city-sized homage to death and destruction could simply not be left alone, for if it fell into the hands of the insurgency, a militia group, or an unreliable government, the consequences could be history-moving.

It is perhaps one of the best signs yet of the relative stability that has been won in Iraq that today in Bayji, Iraq, the U.S. Army ceded control to it's Iraqi counterpart a similarly expansive ammunition depot -- although this one full of even newer, ever-more-usable weapons. The Army says it is the largest remaining depot, with more than 1,400 storage locations housing more than 250 million rounds of ammunition.

In the wrong hands, that ammo could be used to fuel an insurgency that will last decades more. That the U.S. military is handing it over suggests that leaders are confident that the Iraqi Army's hands are reliable. After being burnt so many times by an Iraqi Army rife with sectarianism, this is a major moment of trust.

Labels: Iraq, lessons

Fellow Tribune reporter Maria Villasenor and I stood at the door and took a deep breath.

"I always said I'd hate to be a door-to-door salesman," she chuckled uncomfortably, "because I didn't ever want to have to knock on doors."

"This is definitely the worst part of the job" I agreed.

And with that, we knocked on the door and waited for an answer.

I've done a lot of door knocking over the past few years, mostly with the intention of speaking to family members of servicemen killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a part of my job that has, on a number of occasions, driven me home for a drink.

And sometimes two.

And sometimes more.

This time was a bit different. Victoria Ramos' son was very much alive. But the circumstances that brought us to Ms. Ramos' front porch made the task of knocking on her door just as difficult.

On Thursday, Spc. Belmor Ramos had pleaded guilty to aiding in the murder of four unarmed, bound and blindfolded Iraqi prisoners. And we were there with the goal of convincing Ms. Ramos to talk about it.

I've got a standard line that I use with the families of fallen service members. And though it might sound like a sales pitch, I believe it with every fiber of my being. As honestly, sympathetically and compassionately as I can, I say: "I already know how your child died. What I've come to find out is how he lived."

I don't know what compels someone in such pain to welcome a reporter into their home but I'm not often stopped at the threshold. In the midst of mourning, I've been offered food and drink, been embraced and even included in family prayers.

Ms. Ramos wasn't home when we knocked. So we waited. At half-past-three, a car pulled up to the house. And so we greeted Ms. Ramos in the driveway.

I didn't have a standard line for this situation. No tried and true method of ingratiating myself with a family in this sort of grief.

"We've come to speak to you about your son," I said simply.

Ms. Ramos nodded. Her eyes filled with tears. And then she welcomed us into her home.

About halfway through our interview -- she was more comfortable speaking in Spanish, and I followed along best as I could as Maria asked Ms. Ramos about her son -- the grieving mother stopped.

"Do you have to put this in the newspaper?" she asked. Her eyes, still filled with tears, were pleading.

Maria and I exchanged uncomfortable glances.

"Si," I finally answered. "Es importante."

I paused again and shifted into English. "We already know what your son has done. What we want to know is who he is."

Maria translated. And she told Ms. Ramos that other media were already reporting on the criminal case. We were there, she said, because the crime and verdict were not all our readers should know about her son.

Ms. Ramos nodded. The interview continued. And when we were done, she walked us to the front stairs, kissed our cheeks, and wished us well.

I do not pretend to understand what happened on that night, in Iraq, that Ramos stood guard as his comrades shot each of their prisoners, one by one, in the head. I only know that several members of Spc. Ramos' unit recently had been killed -- and I know what the 28-year-old soldier told the military judge:

"I wanted them dead."

Even before we knocked on the door, Maria and I knew that many of our readers would rush to judgement about Ms. Ramos' son.

Some would call him a murderer. Some would call him a monster. And maybe some still feel that way.

But those who read about Spc. Ramos today in The Salt Lake Tribune today will have to contend with a few other details about his life.

He was a son. And a brother. And a proud soldier.

As a reporter it is not my job to condemn or condone. I can only tell the story.

Maybe we live in a world where people are more comfortable thinking in black and white. But insomuch as I am able, I will do everything I can to tell a story in all of its colors, in all of its shades of gray, in all of its subtleties and all of its complexities.

And that is why I knock on doors.

Labels: Iraq, journalism, lessons, The Fallen

Nearly three years ago, I wrote from Iraq's deadly Anbar Province that "any meaningful, sustainable transfer of power is years away."

This week, the U.S. handed over controlof the province to Iraqi autorities.

Count me as cautiously optimistic.

The largely symbolic act of giving Anbar back to the Iraqis will not, in and of itself, result in the redeployment of U.S. forces out of Iraq's largest province. In fact, 25,000 American troops remain in Anbar, where they will continue to offer support in the form of logistics, artillery, air power, training and will continue to participate in certain joint operations with their Iraqi counterparts. I imagine that this is not what many Americans envisioned when they heard President Bush say, "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down."

But it would be shamefully inaccurate -- and an insult to those who fought so hard and so long to bring some semblance of stability to Anbar -- to suggest that this week's events aren't a promising start. Anbar was the birthplace of Iraq's Sunni-based insurgency, the location of many of the wars deadliest battles and a one-time haven for foreign insurgents, including members of Al Qaida. That the U.S. can even make a straight-faced claim that the Iraqi Army and police forces have taken control of the province is a major step away from the brutal hell that once was that desert province.

It's easy to want to credit U.S. troops alone for this success. Many have. And having lost some friends in Anbar, I feel that urge as well.

But the truth is that the change in Anbar was largely an Iraqi event. Yes, much American blood was split there, but it was Iraqis who stood up against the barbaric tactics of Al Qaida (which, in turn, were prompting sometimes barbaric responses from U.S. the terrorist group's adversaries) who brought the insurgency to it knees.

"This war is not quite over," Marine Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the senior U.S. commander in Anbar, said during the handover ceremony. "But it's being won and primarily by the people of Anbar."

That U.S. commanders have learned to put aside pride and patriotism to credit Iraqis for standing up is a good sign that yes, one day, the Americans might just be able to stand down -- to really stand down -- in Anbar.

Labels: Iraq

When I first visited Iraq in 2005, service members from Utah often told me that they worried that the media made too big a deal out of the violence there.

"It's actually safer to be in Iraq than it is to drive down Interstate 15," I was told by several different soldiers.

Though I understood where they were coming from -- they didn't believe that the deaths of U.S. service members were the only story I should be covering -- their math was considerably askew.

Today, it might be a closer equation.

At least for American GIs, things have become much safer in Iraq over the past six months -- so much so that I can understand how the monotony of war might very well make a drive from Fallujah to Ramadi feel like a commute from Provo to Salt Lake City.

So far this month, just seven U.S. service members have lost their lives in hostile incidents. That's still a solemn sacrifice, but in five years of war, there has never been a less violent time for U.S. troops.

But just as soldiers didn't want me looking at the situation in Iraq through the lens of U.S. fatalities alone back in 2005, we should take care not to do so now.

At a time when U.S. casualties are considerably down, scores of Iraqi police and hundreds of Iraqi citizens are still dying in horrific ways. Just today, four suicide bombers struck in locations throughout Iraq, killing at least 57 people and wounding nearly 300.

As Democratic Presidential hopeful Barack Obama works to convince the American public that a relative lull in violence means we should withdraw our forces, and as Republican rival John McCain counters that that relative lull in violence is an opportunity we should not let pass by withdrawing troops to quickly, the operative word for Iraqis is not "lull" but "relative."

Iraq is still an incredibly violent place. As we consider our future, we should not forget theirs.








Iraq is still at war.

Labels: Iraq, The Fallen

Jed was clearly stoked.

Already, he'd purchased his plane tickets and body armor. Now he was in the market for some advice.

He called me on a Wednesday afternoon, about a week before his planned departure to Kuwait, from where he was hoping to catch a military flight into Iraq. His plan was to spend a month there, covering the war as an embedded reporter for the University of Utah's student newspaper.

The paper's student editor offered a letter of accreditation, but couldn't promise to cover any of Jed's expenses. Undeterred -- particularly after receiving word from Baghdad that his embed request had been approved -- Jed paid for the whole thing out of his own pocket, hoping to reclaim at least some of his expenses through freelance arrangements with various publications, including the newspaper for which I work.

It was nice to see that the general malaise that seems to have overwhelmed the journalism community in this nation hadn't dissuaded this motivated young reporter from taking a shot at the moon. But that he was just now, one week before his trip, reaching out to us was a red flag. And it wasn't the only one.

In a letter to one of my co-workers, who helps advise the college newspaper's student reporters, Jed -- who has written a total of six articles for the paper -- described his quest to embed with U.S. forces in Iraq as "kind of a dream/adventure thing I've been wanting to do for quite some time."

That rubbed me the wrong way. As someone who takes seriously the role of reporters in a war zone, I didn't take kindly to the notion of using the process of embedding as a way to have an adventure.

A quick Internet search told me that Jed had been an Ivy League law school student, where he had been chapter president of a club of future Latter-day Saint lawyers, before dropping out to help work for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. After Romney suspended his campaign Jed landed in Utah, apparently with the intention of finishing school at the S.J. Quinney College of Law.

His work for the student paper was solid, though not stunning. Based on the work he'd done so far, I'd feel comfortable assigning him to cover a military parade. I definitely wouldn't send him to war.

When Jed called me, I told him that the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who escort reporters in combat take on additional risks in doing so. Journalists, who by rule remain unarmed while in an embedded role with U.S. forces, make good targets. And Iraq is a place where insurgent fighters think nothing of blowing up 50 people to get to the one they want to hit.

Such risks should not be asked of our service members unless we are extremely confident that the cause of journalism is being served to its utmost capacity.

That Jed was unable to identify the difference between a technical sergeant and a gunnery sergeant (one is an Air Force rank, the other is a Marine's) told me that he was not prepared to cover the military at even a very basic level, let alone at war. The rest of our conversation left me unclear of his motives for wanting to go to Iraq, but convinced that he had not adequately prepared for the duty and not thought much about what he wanted to do once he arrived in the Middle East.

I told him as much.

Clearly, this was not what he wanted to hear. He thanked me for my "sobering advice." In turn, I offered him the best of luck and safety. We hung up.

But that was not it.

Quickly, I was on the phone to Jed's editor. After that, I e-mailed the military's embed coordinators in Baghdad. Within 24 hours, the paper's editors -- who apparently did not even know that Jed's application to visit Iraq had been approved by the military until they were contacted by our newspaper -- had revoked Jed's accreditation. An Army captain in Baghdad later wrote to thank me for getting involved. Apparently there had been some confusion about Jed's bona fides, leading to the military's agreement to take him on. The captain was relieved that the paper had pulled their support.

But that didn't make me feel good about what I'd done.

I don't enjoy stomping on the dreams of young reporters, particularly those who aspire to cover combat. I've long said that a democratic nation at war should not be spared the details of war. And I've long lamented that we simply do not have enough reporters on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But war is simply not a place to try out being a journalist. It's not a dream. It's not an adventure. And, at least for me, it was not worth the potential price of a service member's life to let Jed learn those lessons the hard way.

Labels: Iraq, journalism

Last year, The Salt Lake Tribune began reporting on an Army officer who, having been forced out of the Utah National Guard after being accused of fraud, found his way into a California Army Reserve unit, where he ultimately was placed in charge of contracts worth up to $500,000 in Iraq.

And then -- surprise, surprise, surprise -- he was accused of fraud again.

This week, the Sacramento Bee has produced a series of reports on a similar subject: Soldiers with criminal pasts who are given second, third and fourth chances in the Army -- only to commit further criminal acts while in uniform.

The Bee's coverage is comprehensive and eye opening. It gets to the heart of the problems inherent in so-called "moral waivers," which increasingly have been provided to would-be soldiers whose checkered pasts would otherwise prevent them from entering the military. It may be one of the best investigative reports I've read this year.

Here's the link to the first story in the series. Links to the rest of the articles can be located on the right-hand side of the page.

And here's the most recent of our reports on Curtis Whiteford:

In e-mails, a wife struggles with husband's alleged thefts in Iraq
Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune

Army Officer Curtis Whiteford was warned by his wife against taking unearned cash from a contractor in Iraq, and he promised her in an e-mail that he would end his part in the corruption, according to documents filed earlier this month in federal court. But prosecutors allege Whiteford, a former Riverton resident, continued to accept thousands of dollars in gifts, including several unauthorized trips home to Utah. He also tried to get a contractor to buy him a sports car and authorized the purchase of weapons, using U.S. government funds, on behalf of a private security company he planned to run with other conspirators.

Whiteford, who was indicted one year ago Friday, and four others face charges of rigging bids on contracts awarded by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-led interim government of Iraq at that time, directing $8.6 million to companies owned and operated by American businessman Philip Bloom.

Whiteford has pleaded not guilty and jury selection for the case is scheduled to begin March 11 in U.S. District Court in New Jersey. Meanwhile, defense attorneys are attempting to have the case dismissed, arguing that the indicted persons were not acting as "public officials" as defined by federal statute, at the time of the alleged offenses.

The case is just one of dozens of similar stories unveiled by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which investigates fraud, waste and abuse in Iraq rebuilding projects.

But the Whiteford e-mails, which show a family struggling over the consequences of involvement in allegedly illegal acts, offer a rare glimpse into the human element of the inspector general's cases, which have involved scores of soldiers and contractors and cost the U.S. and Iraqi governments billions of dollars.

Whiteford resigned from the Utah National Guard in 2002 after an investigation of his pay records revealed "an extraordinary number of days with additional pay." But although Whiteford left the Guard under fire, he didn't resign his Army commission - and that allowed him to transfer into the Army Reserve's California-based 91st Division.

Within a year, he was back in uniform and stationed in Iraq, where he was given the authority to authorize up to $500,000 at a time in expenditures without higher permission, according to court documents.

Following one trip home, allegedly paid for by Bloom, Whiteford received an e-mail from his wife in which she expressed grave reservations about his conduct.

"I may be paranoid but I sometimes feels like every communication we have is being monitored," Carol Whiteford wrote. "The fact is that you work for the Army and are only entitled to that which you earn."

In the letter, Carol Whiteford appears to refer to the Olympic pay scandal that cost her husband, a former senior aviation administrator, his National Guard career. Whiteford was accused of, but never prosecuted for, claiming too many days of additional compensation from the Guard, even though he already had been paid in full for work he had done.

"I asked you about your comp time all the time and you said that it was OK," but, she wrote, "it was questionable. . . .

"I am tired of having my gut in a knot and I figure that I have been right before," she continued. "I just don't want to be left alone to figure out how to house, feed and clothe all these kids with you in the klink. I scares me to death."

The Whitefords, who at the time had been married for nearly 30 years, have eight children.

In response, Curtis Whiteford wrote to his wife that there was "no need to fear," according to the court documents. "After being home with you and discussing the situation I decided on my own to not use any unearned [dollars] again."

But prosecutors allege that through much of the following year, Whiteford continued to help steer contracts to Bloom, worked to procure licenses for Bloom to open a new Baghdad airline and used U.S. funds to purchase weapons, including several rocket launchers, for the security company he planned to open which was to be called Anaconda.

The "key objectives of the company," Whiteford allegedly wrote in an e-mail to the others involved in the case, "are making money while allowing us to look cool and have cool stuff."

A woman who answered the phone at Whiteford's listed number in Box Elder County said Whiteford was not available and said that information about the case that previously had been reported was untrue. She declined to cite specifics, however and would not provide her name.

Labels: Iraq, recruiting

Maybe we should forgive Sen. Bob Bennett for overstating matters when he told The Salt Lake Tribune "there is no question al-Qaida has been defeated in Iraq" on the very same day an apparent AQI martyr killed 20 people, including three U.S. Marines in a suicide bombing.

After all, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki also appears to think his government has "defeated terrorism" as well, according to The Washington Post.

Maliki's comments came on the eve of a new wave of attacks in Baghdad and Diyala.

Overall, violence in Iraq is down precipitously since last year. And that's got al-Maliki talking about negotiating a status of forces agreement with the U.S. that may "put a timetable on their withdrawal."

If terrorism had been defeated in Iraq, of course, there would be no need for a timetable -- U.S. troops could all come home right now.

Labels: Iraq

A new report by the Ft. Leavenworth-based Combat Studies Institute -- a command of official Army historians and deep-thinkers -- is confirming the long-held opinion of post-invasion critics that war planners had too few troops in the ground in Iraq and didn't readily accept the reality that Baghdad had fallen out of control in the months following the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The CSI report is significantly different in tenor than one we heard about back in April of 2006. Then, Utah native Sherman Fleek -- who was working on the official history of reconstruction efforts in Iraq for another command, the Army Center of Military History -- told The Salt Lake Tribune that his report "is going to be a story of success."

Let the historical rumble begin.

It's hard to write history when it's still unfolding, of course, but it seems clear that the period of 2003 to 2007 in Iraq will be forever debated. Was it a period of deep and systemic military failures, giving rise to a civil war in which tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed? Or was it a period in which the U.S. military, confronted by a new kind of warfare, and against an unfamiliar enemy, retooled its strategies and tactics to emerge, in 2008, with a formula that (at least at this moment is history) appears to be winning the day?

If you answered "yes" to both of these questions, you might be right.

For reference, here's the story about Fleek:

Iraq war history in Utahn's hands
Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune

Before the war, the U.S. State Department estimates, Baghdad residents enjoyed more than 16 hours of electricity each day. Last month, they averaged eight. Iraq's employment rate, according to Iraqi and U.S. government data, is as low as it has been at any time since the American-led invasion. And oil production, over the past three months, was lower than in any quarter since the capture of Saddam Hussein.

Sherman Fleek isn't quite ignoring such data, but as he constructs the Army's official history of reconstruction efforts in Iraq, he doesn't appear particularly moved, either.

"This," he said, "is going to be a story of success."

Critics may assume the retired Utah National Guard officer's unbridled optimism is just what the Army ordered, offering a flag-waving version of events that scrubs clean the blood on Baghdad's streets.

The catalog of publications in the Army's Center of Military History, where Fleek's version of events in Iraq will be published, suggests otherwise. From Wake Island to Bataan to Tet, "what went wrong" critiques of America's armed conflicts line the center's library shelves.

In warfare, after all, repeating past mistakes is a sure way to fill body bags.

And the man who sent Fleek on a recent fact-finding trip to Iraq said he had no interest in a favorable but inaccurate report.

"I didn't bias this story," says Jim Crum, Fleek's boss at the federal Project and Contracting Office. "I told him, 'Capture what you see, the good, the bad and the ugly, so to speak, so we can learn from our experiences there.' "

So what, then, accounts for Fleek's apparent disinterest in painting history with the colors of insurrection, violence and futility?

History itself, perhaps.

"I am not trying to equate death and destruction as minor and insignificant, but in the movement of history, on that continuum, what we have been experiencing in these three years in Iraq is really minor compared with other conflicts," Fleek says. "I look at everything in a historical context."

Long interested in the stories of another war - one fought in the United States nearly 150 years ago - Fleek had immersed himself in Civil War history after his retirement from the National Guard in 2002.

When the military called on his services again in March 2005, they found him at the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, a federally funded Civil War preservation organization where the Layton native had taken work as a historian.
For a man who had written and lectured extensively on the Civil War, "reconstruction" was not a term learned as Baghdad fell.

For Fleek, it was a term loaded with historical - and personal - precedent.

Fleek knew, for instance, that post-Civil War reconstruction had not ended until long after Union forces acting as occupiers of Confederate states finally left South Carolina in the late 1870s, a decade and a half after Gen. William Sherman destroyed nearly everything in his path as his troops marched over the Savannah River.

Named for an uncle who, in turn, had been named for the Union general, Fleek understood well the precedent set for destruction - and reconstruction - at that time.

And having come of age during the war in Vietnam, Fleek understood that warfare had not gotten any less bloody or its aftermath any less complicated in more modern times.

"It was 1955 - 10 years after the war with Germany ended - before Germany was a sovereign nation again," Fleek said. "In Japan, it happened in 1952 - a bit quicker because we shoved off quickly when we became engulfed in the Korean War," he said.

In historical comparison to conflicts in which entire cities had been ravaged, Fleek has trouble even calling Iraq's post-Saddam era "reconstruction."

"It's not the proper term for what we're doing," Fleek says. "There was little, very minimal damage to infrastructure during the three-week war. Iraq had been neglected by Saddam and team for nearly 30 years. The oil, water, sewage and electrical systems are 1970s technology or even earlier.

"In truth we are 'constructing' Iraq and not 'reconstructing' Iraq's infrastructure."

Michael O'Hanlon, a researcher with The Brookings Institution, takes issue with Fleek's assessment that damage done - in an invasion that began with a series of airstrikes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld described as "shock and awe" warfare - was "very minimal."

"Even at this late date, we still haven't gotten back to pre-Saddam levels of oil production and electricity," said O'Hanlon, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. "In that sense, perhaps he goes too far."

But O'Hanlon and fellow Iraq expert Bill Evers, a researcher at Stanford University's Hoover Foundation, agree that the U.S. strikes and subsequent invasion did not desolate Iraq's public resources, as had been the standard set in many prior conflicts.

For the problems that the so-called "reconstruction" effort is now trying to fix, Evers blames Saddam's government.

"The whole society had been run down over the last several decades," said Evers, who spent six months in Iraq after the invasion. "There had been no investments in maintenance, no repairs, we saw schools that were flooded in the springtime with sewage water - many things that were not war destruction."

Now, three years after the fall of the former government, Fleek notes that Iraq has a new constitution, hundreds of new and refurbished schools, a growing army, "and on any given day, we have about 60,000 Iraqis working on construction projects."

When historians like himself look back on the reconstruction of Iraq, Fleek thinks, they'll see an unprecedented effort to rebuild, democratize and stabilize. And it is with that in mind, he believes, his affirmative analysis of how billions of U.S. tax dollars were spent in Iraq will not be panned by future peers.

"I don't know how it's all going to turn out - no one does," Fleek said. "But if it turns out like everything else America has done, it's going to be a long, crooked, uphill, downhill, round-the-bend event.

"But we'll get there."

Labels: Iraq

Apparently suffering from the same delusions that gave us such historic blunders of bravado as "Mission Accomplished," "Bring it On" and "Last Throes," Sen. Bob Bennett told The Salt Lake Tribune on Thursday that "there is no question al-Qaida has been defeated in Iraq."

Tell it to the Marines.

Just hours earlier, more than 20 people were killed and dozens more injured in a suicide attack in the aptly named town of Karmah, in Iraq's Anbar province. The dead included the town's mayor, a tribal chief, and three U.S. Marines.

Military leaders said the attack bore the hallmarks of Al Qaida in Iraq.

Violence in Iraq -- and particularly in Sunni areas where al-Qaida previously has thrived -- has fallen precipitously. But to suggest that the international terrorist organization has been defeated there is clearly incorrect.

As any military leader will tell you, winning is not the same as victory and losing is not the same as defeat. And at war, where scores are kept in blood and bodies, it's simply uncouth to call the game early.

Labels: Iraq

Missouri Democrat Rep. Ike Skelton is calling on President Bush to make Afghanistan his top priority.

As casualties in Afghanistan continue to exceed those in Iraq, I'm thinking this comes a bit late, but for what it's worth, Skelton's letter is worth considering.

June 19, 2008

Dear President Bush:

For too long, our efforts in Iraq have overshadowed the war in Afghanistan. The genesis of the 9/11 attack was in Afghanistan and any future attack on our homeland is likely to originate in Afghanistan or in the border region with Pakistan. Afghanistan needs additional resources to succeed, but this is unlikely to be made available while we remain in Iraq in large numbers. We must re-prioritize and shift needed resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. We must once again make Afghanistan our number one priority—our national security and Afghanistan’s future are at stake.

It is very telling that the outgoing Commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, U.S. Army General Dan McNeill, just delivered a sober assessment of the situation in Afghanistan. He reported that in April attacks increased 50 percent in the country's eastern region, where U.S. troops primarily operate, as a spreading Taliban insurgency across the border in Pakistan fueled the surge in violence. This comes as violence continues to rage in the south. It is troubling to learn that hundreds of Taliban fighters recently took control of numerous villages near Kandahar only days after a prison break at a Kandahar jail, in which it appears over 1,000 prisoners, including Taliban fighters, escaped.

At the same time, commanders in Afghanistan have said they are short 3 battalions. The Afghan National Security Forces continue to be plagued by problems, including a shortage of about 3,000 trainers and mentors. Afghanistan’s opium trade continues to flourish and fuel the insurgency. Economic development continues to lag. Official corruption is still widespread. The authority of the central government remains limited. And safe havens in Pakistan continue to thrive, at a time when internal instability in that country has been on the rise.

I believe that the effort in Afghanistan is still winnable, but we cannot underestimate the challenges in all these areas. These challenges must be handled more effectively. Since 2002, the U.S. has provided about $16.5 billion to develop the Afghan National Security Forces. Yet only two Afghan National Army units and no Afghan National Police units are fully capable. Although some NATO countries have made important contributions in Afghanistan, and their military forces have been involved in heavy combat and endured losses, our NATO allies and partners must certainly do more. This is not only critical to security and stability in Afghanistan but to the future of the NATO alliance. However, the U.S. must lead by example. We cannot expect our allies to step up if the U.S. itself does not demonstrate a strong commitment to the success of the Afghanistan mission. The U.S. and the international community must make the war in Afghanistan an urgent top priority and fully commit the necessary leadership, strategy and resources to the cause.

I deeply appreciate your consideration of my views .

Very truly yours,
Ike Skelton

Labels: Afghanistan, Iraq

The news that anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr will boycott coming elections in Iraq should be disconcerting for anyone hoping that the "last throes" Vice President Cheney spoke of were finally coming about for the ever-changing insurgency in Iraq.

Sunni leaders tried this trick a few years back will drastic results. Without Sunni representation -- even minority representation -- in Baghdad, it was easy for insurgent leaders to make the Shiite-dominated government out to be an enemy of the interests of average Sunnis. (And, indeed, in many cases the government was indeed an enemy -- and a brutal one at that.)

Many Sunni leaders eventually came around, but only after a civil war that cost tens of thousands of Iraqi lives.

Meanwhile, not promising at all is another development coming out of the Sadr camp: A new paramilitary group purportedly intended specifically to commit attacks against U.S. troops.

Labels: Iraq, quagmire

Iraq has been sidelined by the economy as the issue voters say is most important to them, heading into this November's presidential election, but it may nonetheless be the issue that distinguishes the two candidates more than any other.

In a couple of nutshells -- and assuming the situation in Iraq continues to improve -- here are the arguments we'll be hearing for the next four months:

John McCain: "If you'd listened to me, and put more troops in from the start, Iraq never would have gotten so bad."

Barack Obama: "If you'd listened to me, and not sent troops to begin with, we wouldn't even be having this discussion."

On ballance -- and even with a strong majority of voters saying they want to get the hell out of Iraq -- I think McCain's argument may sway more voters, and particularly those who supported the invasion to begin with (in other words, a very significant majority.)

Meanwhile, I'm waiting to hear more specific positions about America's direction in that other war -- not to mention the larger fight to keep the U.S. safe from terrorist attack.

Labels: 2008 election, Afghanistan, Iraq

There are a lot of ways to explain the changing tactics being used by U.S. service members in dealing with Iraqi detainees, but I think Utah National Guard soldier Helaman Hurtado put it best:

"Sometimes," the Orem soldier said, "you have to be humble."

Wow. Humility as a counterinsurgency strategy? By the greatest military power the world has ever known? It seems so... well... un-American.

Indeed, a recent article about how U.S. forces have shifted their tactics in an effort to win more hearts and minds inside the walls of the prison known as Camp Bucca, rubbed some readers the wrong way.

"Respect?" wrote one reader, adding a few racial and religious insults for emphasis. "They are scum and murderers and deserve whatever happens to them."

Added another reader: "These prisoners should be treated the exact same way defenders of freedom are treated when captured and that includes beheadings, amputations, etc."

I received several e-mails from readers expressing similar sentiments -- and didn't bother to respond to any of them.

I did spend a little time, however, on an e-mail I received from a public affairs officer in Iraq, who took issue with the words I used to describe Camp Bucca -- and added his two cents about why operations there are both legal and important.

Here's our exchange, followed by the article in question:

FROM: Michael C. Greene
TO: Matthew D. LaPlante
SUBJ: Camp Bucca (unclassified)

"Mr. LaPlante, Sir -- Camp Bucca is a Theater Internment Facility where Service members perform duties involving Detention Operations. Camp Bucca is not a prison. Those individuals held at Camp Bucca are not classified as Prisoners of War. They are considered Detainees, not prisoners, because we detain individuals who pose an imperative threat to security. Iraq is a sovereign nation and the US forces are helping the Government of Iraq improve safety and security. One of the ways we
do that is by detaining individuals who are "imperative threats" to security and stability in Iraq.

Detaining an individual posing such a threat provides an option to temporarily remove him from society. There are approximately 19,000 individuals in detention at the Camp Bucca Theater Internment Facility. If an individual poses a security risk, coalition forces are granted authority under the United Nations Security Council Resolution and Article 78 of the Geneva Conventions to take him into custody as a detainee and continue detention until he no longer poses a risk to the Iraqi people, the Government of Iraq, Coalition Forces and Iraqi Security Forces."

***

FROM: Matthew D. LaPlante
TO: Michael C. Greene
SUBJ: Re: Camp Bucca (unclassified)

"Thanks for your e-mail. The U.S. military can call Bucca an amusement park, for all I care. I do my best not to get mixed up in semantics, particularly military semantics. By definition, Bucca is a prison.

Meanwhile, some of your "imperative threats" are, according to soldiers whose boots were on the ground at Bucca, likely to be innocent Iraqis who were "in the wrong place at the wrong time." By some counts, thousands have been ordered free by the "sovereign" government of Iraq you cite, yet they have been kept in detention at Bucca and other facilities, awaiting a decision by U.S. military officials as to whether or not they still "pose a threat," to U.S. and Iraqi forces.

Having spent time in some of Iraq's most dangerous cities, I understand quite well the friend-or-foe dilemma an occupying force faces against a non-uniformed insurgent threat -- the very dilemma that has resulted in the incarceration of tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens, many of whom had extremely tangential, if any, connection to militias or organized resistance groups. Under such deadly uncertainties, the vast majority of the soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors -- many of whom were trained for one job but are doing another -- who are acting as the face of U.S. policy in Iraq are doing a commendable job in making sure that the shoot-first philosophies that dominated U.S. tactics in the first years of the war have taken a back seat to efforts that have a fighting chance of actually winning some hearts and minds.

They are not helped in this regard by U.S. military and political officials who are still trying to push a black-and-white, right-or-wrong, good-vs.-evil paradigm. Indeed, the recent successes in Iraq suggest that it is through the gray (putting former insurgents on the payroll in Anbar; bringing Baathists back into the fold; and providing detainees -- many of whom were indeed "imperative threats" -- with a rudimentary education and job training) that our nation might just find peace in Mesopotamia."

***

FROM: Michael C. Greene
TO: Matthew D. LaPlante
SUBJ: Re: Camp Bucca (unclassified)

"...that our nation might just find peace in Mesopotamia" -- I'll drink a 'near beer' to that.

***

Rule for GIs: Respect inmates
Soldiers learn many shades of gray among Iraqi prisoners
By Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune

There was a time when American service members assigned to the prison known as Camp Bucca were told they were responsible for guarding "the worst of the worst" in Iraq.

In some cases, that was true. Among the thousands of detainees at the prison were insurgent leaders, terrorists and murderers.

But hundreds of Utahns who have been assigned to the facility over the past year have been part of a rapidly changing strategy in terms of how U.S. forces deal with Bucca's inmates.

And these days, the first rule is respect.

Among many of the approximately 350 soldiers of the 1-145th Field Artillery Battalion who returned from duty in Iraq this week, the past year was an experience in learning that beyond the black-and-white, right-and-wrong, good-and-evil characterizations that dominate political discourse about Iraq are thousands of shades of gray.

"These were not all terrible people," said Michael Nielsen, one of about 130 members of the battalion who arrived back in Utah on two flights Wednesday morning. Another group is due to return late tonight.

"Some of them were just in the wrong place at the wrong time," Nielsen said.

That was a phrase echoed by several of Nielsen's comrades - and which repeated the sentiments of dozens of Hill Air Force Base airmen who returned from Bucca last fall.

"All of them aren't bad," Hill Airman Willie Coffee said in October, moments after stepping off of an airplane at Salt Lake City International Airport, ending a tour of duty in which he learned that, "just like in an American prison, not everyone who gets locked up is guilty."

But unlike an American prison, very few of the more than 20,000 inmates, who filled Bucca as it reached the height of its population late last year, have been granted access to lawyers, judges or juries. And even those who have been granted freedom by Iraqi courts - thousands of them, according to some counts - continue to be held by U.S. forces.

U.S. military commanders say their mandate allows them to hold any prisoner until the detainee is no longer considered a threat, making local Iraqi court rulings irrelevant.

But while the U.S. leaders have not backed down on issues of wartime justice, those assigned to face the detainees - rightly or wrongly caught up in the system - have been told to approach their duties with a softer hand.

"Dignity and respect," explained Levi Boardman, a battalion member from West Jordan. "We were handling some bad eggs ... but most of these guys, they're humans, just like us. A lot of them have the same desires and dreams like Americans have."

And the simple acknowledgement of that fact - coupled with programs designed to give potential insurgents something better to look forward to when they are released - has been paramount in the past year's transformation of Bucca, according to Utah native Michael Pratt, an Army intelligence officer who recently completed a yearlong tour of duty at Bucca with the 384th Military Police Battalion.

In a Salt Lake Tribune op-ed article earlier this month, Pratt wrote that the prison he arrived at a year ago was more or less a warehousing operation that, while designed to take security threats off Iraq's streets, "ironically became one of the world's largest extremist recruiting grounds."

By targeting the needs of Bucca's population - many of whom were illiterate and most of whom were unemployed - the situation began to change.

"A year ago, my top priority was to keep detainees from brutalizing each other; as I depart, it is figuring out how best to teach them to read and write," Pratt wrote.

Helaman Hurtado, a 145th member from Orem, said that Bucca's inmates are largely "ready to do what they need to do to go home to their families."

And while that includes renouncing violence as part of Iraq's overall reconciliation plan, it also means "classes in reading and writing in Arabic, learning math and even some English," Hurtado said.

Are some of those who take advantage of the programs among the "worst of the worst" that U.S. soldiers once were warned of? Most certainly, Hurtado said.

"But there's not an easy answer for everything," he said. "Sometimes, you have to be humble."

Labels: Iraq

You can look at this morning's USA Today cover piece -- which reveals that more than 43,000 "medically unfit" troops were sent to war since 2003 -- in two ways.

1) The numbers reveal, as reporter Gregg Zoroya writes, "another sign of stress," on the thinly stretched U.S. military.

2) The numbers reveal a military whose members are committed to their service. How so? While some service members would undoubtedly allow a few extra pounds, a heart murmur or a bad back to keep them from being sent to war, the reason so many are being sent anyway is likely due, in part, to the fact that they don't want to be kept from going to war. And so, when the time comes, they don't push those issues.

(For the record, I think USA Today's numbers indicate both a sign of stress and a cohort of committed service members that aren't going to let a poor medical exam keep them from doing their jobs.)

As one Marine told me last week, and I've heard so many times before: "This is what we train for. We train for war. Why would you want to train so hard for something and then, when it finally happens, not be in the fight?"

Over the next few weeks, I'll be working on a story about what I've come to think of as the "Iraq Generation" of U.S. service members -- individuals who have enlisted or re-enlisted into the U.S. military since the beginning of the Iraq war (this group now accounts for a majority of U.S. troops) and thus joined up knowing perfectly well that doing so meant going to war.

Do you know someone in the "Iraq Generation"? You can reach me at military@sltrib.com.

Labels: Iraq, statistics

Following a visit to Iraq's volatile Anbar Province in 2005, during the heart of the Sunni-led insurgency, I wrote that while many places in the war-torn nation were experiencing some improvements in security and stability, Anbar was "years away" from "any meaningful, sustainable transfer of power" between the region's American occupiers and Iraqi government forces.

That thesis was backed by the assessment of provincial Governor Ma'amoun Sami Rashid al-Awani, who told me that most of his police officers couldn't so much as come out of their heavily fortified stations. "Right now the ones who are responsible for security are the Americans," he said.

These are the kind of things that I really wouldn't mind being wrong about. But nearly three years later, American Marines remain in large number in the western desert province -- and military leaders say they'll need to remain there for some time if recent security gains are to be maintained.

Still, there have been marked improvements in Anbar, as evidenced by reports from a company of Marines -- many of whom had previously served in Anbar -- that returned from Iraq on Thursday. See story here

Brian Blackmer, who first served in Anbar in 2006 and came back to the province with Charlie Company just over a year later said he was shocked by what he found on his return trip. "There were Iraqi police officers everywhere," Blackmer said. "There were cops on every corner. My first time, if you saw an Iraqi police officer -- well, the thing is, you just didn't."

The numbers back up Blackmer's assessment. Today's Anbar Province still ain't Disneyland, but there are indeed tens of thousands more Iraqi police officers on the streets of Ramadi and Fallujah. And quite clearly, it is a far less dangerous place than it was just a few years back. So a meaningful and sustainable transfer of power, while immediately impossible, may not be far away.

But in Iraq, the old dance goes something like this: One step forward, two steps back. Two steps forward, one step back.

Cha cha cha.

Even as the threat of the Sunni insurgency (which fueled Anbar's volatility) has diminished, new threats have emerged. If you've been listening to the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus, you know that the latest, greatest enemy (in a long, long list of ever-evolving latest greatest enemies) are Shiite militias, allegedy backed by Iran.

These so-called "special groups" aren't a problem in predominantly Sunni Anbar, of course. And their violent rise to the top of the U.S military's list of bad guys might help explain why Sunni tribal leaders rather suddenly began supporting the American effort in Anbar last year. As the old proverb (often attributed to Arab philosophers) goes: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Where does that leave U.S. troops in Iraq? Allied with an old enemy. Trying to find new friends. And still years away from any meaningful and sustainable transfer of power.

***

Here's our story from Sept. 29, 2005:

Chaos rules in largest Iraqi state
Al Anbar Province: Officials agree a U.S. military withdrawal could be years away; U.S. troops needed for security in Iraqi province
By Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune

RAMADI, Iraq -- Bullet-riddled and mortar-scarred, the walls of this provincial capital's center of government tell its story. The damage is both old and new: From American troops, as they secured this city in the spring of 2003, and from insurgents, as they have tried to wrest control away from the Americans ever since.
Gunbattles have erupted here lately, at least once a week. Mortar and rocket attacks are common.
Meanwhile, the work of building a government continues inside walls protected by the U.S. Marine Corps. A City Council has been formed. Tribal sheiks meet with military and municipal officials once a week.
And the provincial governor of Al Anbar Province, one of the most heavily guarded -- and targeted -- men in the nation, each day arrives at work to try to restore order to a land that is, by all accounts, in chaos.
President Bush and his advisers say the U.S. military will leave Iraq when local government and military can take charge of security -- and ask to do so.
But in Al Anbar Province, the nation's largest, and home to more than 1 million Iraqis, government and military officials say any meaningful, sustainable transfer of power is years away.
So even as patience wears thin in the United States, Al Anbar Governor Ma'amoun Sami Rashid al-Awani won't so much as entertain the thought of an American pullout.
"Even the idea of an American withdrawal, without a substitute, somebody to replace it, this is not good idea at all," al-Awani said in an interview in his Ramadi Government Center office. "They cannot withdraw."

No job security:
Al Anbar's first governor following the U.S. invasion of Iraq resigned as a condition of having his three sons released by kidnappers. Less than a year later, his replacement was forced out by the provincial council.
The next man in the volatile succession was abducted just days after taking office. His body was found three weeks later, blindfolded and bound to a gas cylinder, in an insurgent safehouse.
The enormous, expressive man now hulked behind the ornate wooden desk in the governor's office has, since his May appointment -- survived multiple assassination attempts -- including one at a local mosque in which a sheik from his tribe was slain.
But al-Awani is confident that an increasing number of people in Al Anbar are willing to work with him toward establishing peace in the province.
Many in the province, however, are unaware that al-Awani's son was kidnapped from school earlier this month. The teenager was held for more than a week before being released after a ransom was paid, according to Iraqi government officials.
Al-Awani tightly controlled the release of news about the kidnapping -- not for fear of his son's life, he says, but because the people of Al Anbar do not need to hear news that makes them question the stability of their new government.
Even with friendly local media, though, al-Awani says the work of bringing order to chaos will be slow going.
Police stations are being rebuilt -- at least eight have been destroyed by insurgents in the past two years -- and training is under way for Iraqi military brigades that will be headquartered in Al Anbar.
But, al-Awani acknowledged, it is unsafe for most police officers to leave their station.
"Right now the traffic police, they are the only ones who are working," he said.
Responding to serious offenses is left to local families, tribes and other members of the community. And al-Awani said he does not know how long it will be until residents can count on their own government to provide day-to-day security.
"Right now the ones who are responsible for security are the Americans," he said.
But how much control do U.S. troops -- approximately 32,000 of them are in the region -- maintain over Al Anbar?

Who's in charge?
Those called "insurgents" and "terrorists" by the U.S. and Iraqi forces -- they are known, simply, as "the fighters" here -- have the run of much of Ramadi, though U.S. commanders dispute who maintains actual control.
"We are in control," boasted Col. John Gronski, commander of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, which oversees infantry operations in the area. "I can have any piece of land in this city, any time I want."
Gronski's associates have proved as much in Fallujah and Tal Afar, cities that U.S. and Iraqi forces have virtually swept clean of insurgent fighters in past months.
Ramadi, scene of about a quarter of American deaths in Iraq over the past month, would be a grander, and probably bloodier, challenge.
Even if coalition troops were to stage a major offensive in the provincial seat -- and some here say the beginning stages of such an action are under way -- they do not have the troop strength to hold the ground for a long period.
Even in Fallujah, said to be many times safer today than before U.S. forces staged a counteroffensive against insurgent fighters there in November, U.S. military convoys are unable to drive through town. The roads remain so dangerous, in fact, that U.S. Army fuel trucks based in Taqaddum follow a 130-mile roundabout route to bring gas to the base near Ramadi, rather than take the 10-mile route that would take their convoys through Fallujah.
In any case, some Army officials note, in an area of the country already seething with anger toward its occupiers, the secondary effects of an offensive in the capital city would not be constructive.
Though he is eager to rid his city of insurgent fighters, al-Awani is not willing to see his home come under an American siege.
But the Iraqi-grown security that al-Awani needs -- and U.S. forces are counting on to allow them to go home -- doesn't look to be in place anytime soon.

A new Iraqi army:
Assembling a new Iraqi Army, to replace the one built by Saddam, would have taken time and patience anyway. But with insurgent fighters targeting enlistees, the effort -- especially in Al Anbar -- has moved with all the swiftness of a battalion of soldiers marching through soft desert sand.
The Iraqi Security Force is seeking to place 5,000 soldiers in Al Anbar. But two years into the building of this nation's new military, it has met less than two-fifths of that goal.
"I would say there are probably under 2,000 right now," said Brig. Gen. James Williams, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force Augmentation Command Element, whose responsibilities include helping to train Iraqi recruits.
And at any given time, Williams acknowledged, up to 20 percent of the Iraqi Army in this area is listed as absent without leave.
"They have people that leave, for what they call their leave period and sometimes they don't come back," Williams said. "Typically these are new recruits, typically coming into the unit, who wanted to do something for their country but they decided, maybe this is a little bit crazier than I thought."
Compounding that problem are difficulties getting contractors to accept jobs with the Iraqi Security Force, Williams said. For example, he said, it is sometimes difficult to find contractors willing to build barracks for Iraqi soldiers.
"Some contractors don't show up, because, depending on what you look at Ramadi is the second or third most dangerous city in the world," Williams said. But even soldiers who answer the call and stick to it maintain a dim view of the current state of Al Anbar -- and their ability to take charge of it any time soon.
Soldiers' families targeted: Iraqi soldiers and their families are targeted for kidnapping, torture -- even beheading -- by insurgent fighters. So for many, all but their closest confidants believe they are working as truckers, fishermen or foreign laborers, far away from home.
For their risks, new enlistees take in about $400 a month -- and typically receive every third week off.
Some are devoted. Even after insurgents kidnapped and tortured four members of his family in Baghdad, Adu Jabar Mutlak Adulani returned to serve in uniform.
"If we do not defend our nation, who will? The terrorists?" he asked. "We want to depend on ourselves."
Adulani and his comrades, stationed in Al Anbar, are confident of their training -- which they received, garrison-style, under the tutelage of U.S. Marines. But they say training will only take them so far.
"We lack underwear, blankets, boots and clothes and our weapons are old," said Muhammad Adidul-Husseil, who also comes from Baghdad. "And the food -- the chicken -- it is inedible."
Lt. Col. Ghanem Mohammad Shbot Al Zehiri took issue with the complaint about the chicken -- the contractor who provides his soldiers food is working to improve, he said.
But Zehiri did not deny his troops are lacking basic support and supplies.
"The Iraqi army, right now, is not ready," Zehiri said. "We need a great deal many things. We need an air force. We need artillery. We do not have these things. We do not even have mortars."
And even if the Iraqi army was able to muster all the bodies and weapons it needs to adequately take over the American occupation, military commanders say it is likely that it would still be considered an occupation.
Most of the soldiers in the Iraqi Security Force are from the nation's eastern, predominantly Shiite areas. Most of Al Anbar is composed of Sunnis.
With sparks of civil war already flying between militant groups from the two Islamic sects, Zehiri said an American withdrawal could fuel an inferno.
"There would be bloodshed."

Labels: Iraq

More U.S. service members died in Operation Iraqi Freedom in April than at any time since last September. Whether this signals the end to a period of waning violence across Iraq is debatable, but the U.S. body count is not the only ominous sign. More than 1,300 Iraqis were killed in bombings, shootings and grenade attacks, or otherwise turned up dead across Iraq in the past month, and as more report of violent deaths come in over the next few days, that figure is likely to meet or exceed March's total of 1,378 civilians killed, as tallied by the non-profit Website Iraq Body Count, which draws its tallies from media, hospital, morgue, non-governmental organizations and official figures from the U.S. and Iraqi governments. In general the IBC tabs have been rising for several months after a period of relative calm in late 2007 and early 2008 but still remain substantially lower than the numbers from last year.

At the moment, security conditions in Iraq still appear to remain much improved from last year, a time which saw the highest numbers of U.S. and Iraqi casualties since the beginning of the war. But from a U.S. political perspective the question is: How low is low enough? In other words, what is the number of casualties that keeps Iraq off the front page, away from the House and Senate floors and fixed as a matter of lesser importance to the presidential campaign?

For the past six months, that number appears to have been 40. That's the exact number of (mostly) U.S. and (a few) allied service members who died while serving in OIF during four of the past six months (December saw 24 fatalities and in February there were 30.)

During that period of time, the number of media stories about Iraq fell substantially. Meanwhile, pollsters found that America's increasingly sputtering economy had taken precedence over the war as the greatest concern for U.S. voters. In turn, would-be presidential candidates Clinton, Obama and McCain shifted their messages from guns to butter.

With at least 51 U.S. dead in April (still one of the lowest fatality figures since the immediate aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion) it remains to be seen whether the slight increase in flag-draped returns will draw America's attention back to the war.

Labels: Iraq, statistics

Defense analyst Michael O'Hanlon was in Salt Lake City on Friday to make his case for splitting the difference between sticking-it-out and getting-the-hell-out of Iraq. His basic suggestion for the next president: Take advantage of the improvements bought by the U.S. military surge and other factors by allowing the Iraqi government to continue to make gradual progress toward political reconciliation. Doing so, he suggests, means halting any significant troop withdrawals until after Iraq's 2009 national elections.

Oh yeah, and stop thinking in terms of "victory" -- because it just ain't gonna happen.

"I don't talk about victory, or tirumph, a great accomplishment or redifining the Middle East," O'Hanlon told a packed auditorium at Westminster College.

Rather, O'Hanlon said, he would simply like to see "a minimal standard of success" in Iraq.

How minimal? O'Hanlon said the best we can hope for, at this point, is that U.S. troops will begin to leave Iraq in 2010 having ensured that the nation has no weapons of mass destruction -- which don’t appear to have been there to begin with -- isn't harboring or exporting terrorists and isn't going to tumble into civil war and mass genocide as we leave.

"We will be lucky to escape with some of our pride," he said. "My bar is low."

Labels: Iraq, quagmire

The Associated Press reports that an Iraqi judicial committee has ordered photographer Bilal Hussein should be freed after early two years in U.S. military custody.

Not much other information on this subject yet, but the AP reports that Bilal was released under the nation's new amnesty law. It may be worth noting that release under that law is not the same as an exoneration of the accusations, but I'm sure that distinction matters little to Bilal and his family right now.

You can read my takes of Bilal's case here and here

UPDATE: Heres AP's full report on the case. It notes that the Iraqi courts can't force the U.S. to release Bilal, which sort of throws a wrench in the concept of Iraqi sovereignty...


By ROBERT H. REID
Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD (AP) -- An Iraqi judicial committee has dismissed terrorism-related allegations against Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein and ordered him released nearly two years after he was detained by the U.S. military.

A decision by a four-judge panel said Hussein's case falls under a new amnesty law. It ordered Iraqi courts to "cease legal proceedings" and ruled that Hussein should be "immediately" released unless other accusations are pending.

The ruling is dated Monday but AP's lawyers were not able to thoroughly review it until Wednesday. It was unclear, however, whether Hussein would still face further obstacles to release.

U.S. military authorities have said a U.N. Security Council mandate allows them to retain custody of a detainee they believe is a security risk even if an Iraqi judicial body has ordered that prisoner freed. The U.N. mandate is due to expire at the end of this year.

Also, the amnesty committee's ruling on Hussein may not cover a separate allegation that has been raised in connection with the case.

AP President Tom Curley hailed the committee's decision and demanded that the U.S. military "finally do the right thing" and free Hussein.

Under Iraq 's 2-month-old amnesty law, a grant of amnesty effectively closes a case and does not assume guilt of the accused.

Hussein has been held by the U.S. military since being detained by Marines on April 12, 2006, in Ramadi, about 115 kilometers (70 miles) west of Baghdad . Throughout his incarceration, he has maintained he is innocent and was only doing the work of a professional news photographer in a war zone.

The amnesty committee's decision covers various allegations by the U.S. military against Hussein, including claims he was in possession of bomb-making material, conspired with insurgents to take photographs synchronized with an explosion and offered to secure a forged ID for a terrorist evading capture by the military.

The committee may still be reviewing a separate allegation that Hussein had contacts with the kidnappers of an Italian citizen, Salvatore Santoro, whose body was photographed by Hussein in December 2004 with two masked insurgents standing over Santoro with guns.

Hussein was one of three journalists who were stopped at gunpoint by insurgents and taken by them to see the propped-up body. None of the journalists witnessed his death, said Santiago Lyon, AP's director of photography. The AP wrote a story about the incident at the time.

The AP said a review of Hussein's work and contacts also found no evidence of any activities beyond the normal role of a news photographer. Hussein, 36, was a member of an AP team that won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 2005, and his detention has drawn protests from rights groups and press freedom advocates such as the Committee to Protect Journalists.

"The Amnesty Committee took only a few days to determine what we have been saying for two years. Bilal Hussein must be freed immediately," said Curley, the AP's president.

"The U.S. military has said the Iraqi process should be allowed to work. It has, and the military must finally do the right thing by ending its detention of a journalist who did nothing more than his job. Bilal's imprisonment stands as a sad black mark on American values of justice and fairness," Curley added.

The U.S. military referred the case in December to an investigating judge, who reviewed the evidence and submitted his findings to the Central Criminal Court of Iraq to determine whether the case should go to trial.

In February, however, parliament approved a law providing amnesty to those held for insurgency-related offenses -- including detainees such as Hussein who have never been convicted.

The committee from the Iraqi Federal Appeals Court ruled Monday that allegations against Hussein were covered by the Anti-Terrorist Law and were subject to the amnesty law.

The order was sent to the Iraqi public prosecutor, but it was unclear if it had been received.

A lawyer for the AP was provided a copy of the order, but Wednesday was a public holiday in Iraq and government offices were closed.

The amnesty committee - or any Iraqi institution - cannot force the U.S. military to release or turn over any of the estimated 23,000 detainees it holds in Iraq . But a provision in the amnesty law states that the Iraqi government "is committed to take the necessary measures to move the arrested people" from U.S. control.

Labels: Bilal Hussein, Iraq, journalism

Blaming "the lack of reasoned discourse" among U.S. politicians for delaying progress in Iraq, Rep. Chris Cannon on Tuesday acknowledged that, sometimes, "Republicans have been ready to portray every success as a turning point."

Indeed, sometimes they even like to portray every failure that way...

Who could forget Donald Rumsfeld's claims that the post-invasion looting that stripped Iraq of billions in cultural and industrial resources was an unfortunate side effect of freedom. "Freedom's untidy," he shrugged.

Or what about Dick Cheney's prediction (circa 2005) that the insurgency -- approaching the height of its violent power at the time -- was, in fact, in its "last throes?"

Or how about that guy who looked at the Iraqi Army's less-than-glorious march on the southern city of Basra last week and concluded: "Contrary to what the MSM would have you believe, Muqtada Al-Sadr (who is hiding in Iran) and his Mehdi Army were soundly defeated in Basra and Najaf in the last few weeks by American forces and a majority of Iraqi forces."

That's Chris Cannon, by the way, standing up for reasoned discourse.

Labels: Iraq

Bobby Ghosh's recent article in Time Magazine is worth reading, particularly by those who are so certian that the most humane course of action the U.S. can take is to simply leave Iraq.

Ghosh reports: "The Baghdadis caught between these extremes know that the only thing standing in the way of another sectarian conflagration is the U.S. military. This may explain why every Iraqi who offers me a view on American politics seems to be praying for a McCain victory."

Labels: 2008 election, Iraq, quagmire

The (left of) Center for American Progress is out with a new report from think tankers Larry Korb and Brian Katulis, which argues that Iraq today "is no closer to becoming a dependable and independent ally in the fight against radical Islamist extremists than it was in January 2007 and the United States is less secure than it was 15 months ago."

That's a debatable case, but as President Bush and presumptive Republican presidentital nominee John McCain continue to press the case for fighting Al Qaida in Iraq, what may be most valuable about the report is its primer of how much more complicated Iraq's security is.

Yes, Al Qaida continues to recruit, train and fight in Iraq, but were U.S. forces to suddenly wipe that group off the face of Babylon, the security situation in Iraq wouldn't be much better.

Here's a quick breakdown of all the lovely wars being fought in Iraq today, summarized from the CAP report:

> Muqtada Al Sadr's Madhi Militia is battling the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq's Badr Brigade.
> The Madhi Militia is also engaged in operations agaist Iraqi government forces and their U.S. allies.
> The smaller Fadhila movement also is fighting for power in southern Iraq against rival Shiite groups such as the Madhi and the Badr Brigade.
> Sunni insurgents, some allied with Al Qaida, continue to fight U.S. forces and Iraqi police and Army, as well as against other Shiite militias.
> Sunni insurgents, some allied with Al Qaida, also are doing battle with the so-called "Awakening" movements in Anbar and Diyala provinces.
> Kurdish rebels are fighting mainline Kurdish forces in Northern Iraq.
> The Kurdish rebels also are engaged in resistance against sporadic over-the-border incursions by Turkish troops.

Want to wager on how many Americans are aware of these complexities in Iraq?

Yes sir or ma'am, things are even more complicated that they were in 2005, when I penned a story about "The invisible enemy in Iraq" but the observations of a Virginia soldier named William Clark, who lamented: "How can we know who is our enemy when we don't even know why we're here?"

Here's the whole story from November 14, 2005:

The invisible enemy in Iraq
By Matthew D. LaPlante 
The Salt Lake Tribune  

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A bright orange haze, where the desert meets the sky, has swallowed the sun once again. At a rough Army outpost, just south of Iraq's capital city, some U.S. soldiers lounge along a row of makeshift benches, sharing with one another some recently obtained "intelligence."

"They keep their foot soldiers drugged," says one.

"Most are from other Middle Eastern countries, coming over the borders to fight us here," says another.

"Once," interjects a third, "a bus drove up into the middle of one town, and over the loudspeaker, a man asked who wanted to give himself to Allah. And right there 20 men jumped on board."

"They hate us," a final soldier adds, "and they hate freedom."

Zhou Dynasty strategist Sun Tzu's sagest advice, "know your enemy," has never been easy to follow. But some Iraq experts caution that, in this conflict, soldiers and civilians alike may have forgotten it altogether. What substitutes, even among top political and military leaders, is often well-intentioned rumor and speculation -- and, sometimes, poorly developed racial and religious composites.

But the insurgency is significantly more diverse than described by many troops. Its warriors' varied motives are much less simplistic than defined by political leaders.

So who is the enemy?

A 13-year-old Sunni boy in Abu Ghraib prison for murder, told by his extremist uncle that the cost of manhood was an American soldier's life.

A 20-year-old Shiite man in Najaf, still pining for retribution in the killing of more than 200 of his fellow militiamen in a battle with American forces last year.

An out-of-work carpenter, engineer or teacher. A former Baathist Army officer, cut off from his pension and not allowed to serve his new nation. The relatives of a Shiite family mistakenly killed by a U.S. soldier who feared their vehicle carried explosives.

"There is not one face, one agenda and one ideology," says Judith Yaphe, a former Iraq analyst with the CIA and a senior fellow at the National Defense University. "What you have is multiple insurgencies."

But Yaphe said there is no way to accurately estimate the number of insurgents in Iraq.

And multiple motives: Political power, resistance to the occupation, a need for money.

Indeed, the enemy described by most -- religious extremists from foreign nations, including elements of al-Qaida -- makes up only a small percentage of the fighters in Iraq, Yaphe says.

"Ninety percent of this is an Iraqi event," she says.

Multiple insurgencies:

At a sparse Marine Corps base south of Lake Habbaniyah, in the volatile Al Anbar Province, a cluster of military truck drivers huddles around a red-freckled staff sergeant giving instructions for the upcoming evening's mission.

He takes roll, ticks through the latest intelligence report -- another set of roadside bombs has been discovered on the night's route -- and looks down at his clipboard to see what is left to be covered.

"OK, OK," he says, "What's next? Enemy description -- well, you know, they look like every other Middle Eastern guy out here."

"Except they shoot at you," shouts a stout, young specialist standing in the back of the group.

The brusque reply draws a hearty laugh from the muster of drivers, but also a few anxious expressions. Truth is it's impossible for soldiers to know whether those they pass on the roads are friend or foe.

In nearby Ramadi, Sunni stronghold and center of much insurgent action, soldiers make something of a game out of pegging the men who stand on the roadside, staring coldly at passing U.S. convoys.

"That guy's Moojh, right there," one Army officer says, as he catches the scowl of a young man leaning, cross-armed, in the doorway of a rundown cinder-block home.

The officer's guess -- that the teenager was a trained Islamic warrior, known as mujahedeen -- will remain unproven. The armored Humvee rumbles past without further ado. In these parts, it is unwise to halt a convoy for anything less than battle.

Senate Intelligence Committee member Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, says he believes much of the insurgency is made up of Islamic fundamentalists, like those thought to be staring down American convoys in Ramadi. Many, he says, want to prevent democracy from taking root in Iraq and come from a variety of nations, with anti-Zionists leading the way.

"Hatred toward Israel is the driving force," he says.

"There are other groups as well," he says. "I don't want to oversimplify it because there were many groups that came together."

The alignment of groups against the United States, however, is in dispute. Indeed, in Iraq, having a mutual enemy in the United States does not necessarily make allies of groups that have warred for centuries.

More than a year has passed since the last major uprising in the holy Shiite city of Najaf -- with religious and militia leaders calling for a cessation of attacks against American forces in favor of a political solution. But not all of those who participated are ready to give up the struggle.

The roads near Najaf are routinely clear of hidden explosives and suicide car bombers, but small arms fire continues to be a hazard. That doesn't mean, however, those responsible for the gunfire are aligned, even peripherally, with Sunni extremists, like bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi, more commonly associated with the insurgency.

"I've never met a single person who supports bin Laden or Zarqawi," says Will Van Wagenen, a Salt Lake City native and member of the nonprofit Christian Peacemaker Teams, who recently met with members of the al-Mahdi militia at Najaf's Wadi al-Salem cemetery, where they had clashed with U.S. troops for three weeks in August 2004.

"But," Van Wagenen says, "a lot of people support continued attacks against the Americans."

A secret poll commissioned by the British government and conducted by an Iraqi research team confirmed that assessment, according to London's Sunday Telegraph. The newspaper reported last month that nearly half of Iraqis believe attacks against occupation forces are justified.

'You have a lot of freedom':

It has been several days since the bombing, but the soldiers who have gathered in a dusty tent on this sweltering Iraqi afternoon are still searching for answers. To the front of the congregation, past an empty set of combat boots and inverted rifle, walks a stern-faced colonel.

Kevin Jones, he says, did not die in vain. He was killed fighting for freedom, in a foreign land that was not his own.

In death, the 21-year-old specialist joined more than 80 other soldiers slain in the 30 days leading up to the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum. Attacks on coalition forces appear to increase during such times, Defense Department officials note, saying this indicates the insurgents are aiming to thwart freedom and democracy.

Yaphe, the former CIA analyst, says it does seem clear that most insurgent groups want to see the current Iraqi government fail. But she says it would be a mistake to assume any of those groups are of one mind on what they'd like to see in the aftermath.

And she believes the oft-stated notion that insurgents are the enemies of freedom around the world is incorrect.

"That's one of George Bush's favorites, but in my heart of hearts, I really don't think they care if we live in a democracy or we have freedom or that we live on the moon," Yaphe says. "They don't like what we do. We represent incarnate evil to many. Some are glad Saddam is gone and don't like us. Others regret Saddam is gone and don't like us."

Having come to believe such descriptions, Capt. Dan Kwok, an Army physician who treated inmates at the military prison in Abu Ghraib, was taken back by the claims of one highly educated prisoner he came to know.

The inmate, Kwok says, was a medical doctor, like himself, who worked for Zarqawi's network of fundamentalist guerrilla fighters.

"I asked him, 'Where would you like to live, if you could live anywhere in the world?' " recalls Kwok, a graduate of Brigham Young University. "And he told me, 'In the United States, because you have a lot of freedom there.' "

Van Wagenen heard similar themes among those he came to know in Iraq, including resistance supporters of both Shiite and Sunni persuasion.

One Shiite Kurd with whom Van Wagener worked was most upset by the reasoning, often stated by Bush in recent speeches -- and commonly repeated by soldiers in Iraq -- that the war was being fought abroad "before they attack us at home."

"He told me, 'When you say that, you are saying that American lives are more important than Iraqi lives. We had nothing to do with Sept. 11, but you are making Iraq a magnet for terrorists,' " Van Wagenen recalls.

Rather than wanting to stop the march of freedom, Iraqis desire to accept it on their own terms, Van Wagenen said.

And for some, the fight against American-led occupation forces is part of that struggle.

'How can we know?':

A bone-chilling wind has picked up at Camp Striker in Baghdad. Pvt. Patrice Gittens is slouched on a bench, shivering in her Army warm-ups as she watches other soldiers play basketball under a set of makeshift spotlights.

Gittens fights the urge to retreat to her tent, worried that she'll wake up tomorrow to the sound of mortar explosions, as is routine these days.

"If those mortars didn't go off in the morning, every morning, I'd be late for work," she says.

Who is responsible for the near daily bombings?

"I don't know," she says. "I suppose insurgents. Trying to get rid of us, I guess. I guess they hate us because we done blown up half their country."

Standing nearby, Spc. William Clark playfully tugs at Gitten's leg to lighten the mood, but he himself doesn't stay jovial for long.

"You know, the president and all these people say it's al-Qaida, but no one knows who al-Qaida is," says Clark, a Virginia farm boy who just began his second tour in Iraq.

The first time around, with Saddam Hussein still on the lam and with the hunt still on for the dictator's alleged stash of weapons of mass destruction, Clark figured he knew who the enemy was.

This time around, after leaving an infant daughter back home, he's no longer so certain.

"How can we know who is our enemy," he says, "when we don't even know why we're here?"

Labels: Bush, Iraq

As the smoke begins to settle from the past month of fighting in Iraq, it is worth noting that, in spite of increased violence from north (Mosul) to middle (Baghdad) to south (Basra,) U.S. casualties do not appear to have substantially increased.

It is far too early to say whether this is an indication that Iraq's military is finally "standing up," allowing U.S. troops to "stand down" as President Bush long has promised would occur. And indeed, the signs out of Basra, in particular, are not considerably promising in this regard.

But if part of the Republican strategy for winning this war is simply buying time, there is no better currency than a continued slow trickle of flag-draped coffins. Americans are, after all, proving particularly adept at ignoring this war, particularly when only a few dozen familes and communities have to deal with the most immediately devastating of its consequences each month.

Labels: Iraq

Citing improvements in the security and economy of Iraq, Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Thursday that he doesn't plan any further troop increases there.

"I have not talked about maybe increasing troop levels, because I don't think it would be necessary," McCain told The Salt Lake Tribune.

But that was news to us. After all, McCain's Web site clearly stated that the Arizona Senator supports an increased military presence in Iraq.

Here's what the site said Thursday on the "Issues" page devoted to the War:

"A greater military commitment now is necessary if we are to achieve long-term success in Iraq. John McCain agrees with retired Army General Jack Keane that there are simply not enough American forces in Iraq. More troops are necessary..."

Here is a piece of McCain's site from Thursday:



Asked to reconcile the difference in McCain's words and Web site, spokeswoman Crystal Brenton explained that the Iraq Issues page was, in fact, more than a year old and represented the candidate's pre-surge thinking on the issue.

Brenton said the Website would be fixed to represent McCain's current plan for Iraq.

And that plan, she said, was "victory."

Labels: election, Iraq

Vice President Cheney, Monday, on the fifth anniversay of the war in Iraq:

"So if you reflect back on those five years, I think it's been a difficult, challenging, but nonetheless successful endeavor... we've come a long way in five years, and that it's been well worth the effort."

Makes you wonder: By what measure does the veep gauge success?

Labels: Iraq

I've heard it increasingly from service members home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It usually takes a few days for it to hit them. And then it does. Hard.

The military may be at war, but the rest of the country isn't.

Mostly, the evidence is anecdotal. Hollywood superstars on the cover of magazines at the grocery store checkout line. Entire TV newscasts that fail to so much as mention that our nation's military is fighting on two fronts overseas. Family members and friends complaining about annoying coworkers, the cancellation of a good TV show or the recent trading of a basketball star from their favorite team.

As one soldier put it to me, "Everyone cares about the next American Idol. No one cares about the next American soldier."

Now, to back up that sad observation, some data: The Pew Research Center for People and the Press has found that public awareness of the most basic of war facts -- the number of soldiers killed so far in Iraq -- has declined sharply in the past six months.

Going back as far as 2004, Pew has been asking people in its surveys to estimate how many service members have been killed. Usually about 50 percent of Americans could correctly estimate the answer. In the most recent poll, however, just 28 percent (+/- 3%) of Americans could pick out the correct number when given a choice of:

A) Around 2,000
B) Around 3,000
C) Around 4,000
D) Around 5,000

I hasten to point out that this was, essentially, a multiple-choice quiz because that 28 percent figure is NO BETTER THAN IF EVERYONE HAD JUST RANDOMLY PICKED AN ANSWER!

Perhaps not coincidentally, Pew's researchers note, the percentage of news coverage devoted to Iraq has fallen to its lowest level ever, with just 3 percent of the "news hole" filled with stories about that war, according to the News Content Index conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

If this is all the attention that America's troops are getting in the middle of a war, then I wonder what will become of them in 10, 20 or 30 years. How will our nation remember their sacrifice?

In this Sunday's Tribune we'll be putting that question to some "experts" -- men and women who fought in another war, more than three decades ago.

Labels: Iraq, statistics, veterans

A few key paragraphs from today's news roundup.

Iraq is growing less peaceful and tranquil by the day. The past several weeks have seen a return to the kind of horrifying, spectacular violence that the administration's military surge was supposed to have ended. All of us, even the presidential candidates, had better pay attention to what's going on in Iraq.
- Eugene Robinson, Washington Post

Most Democrats -- indeed, most Americans -- believe the Iraq war has been a huge mistake for this country. The viewpoints of anti-war critics are largely sincere, legitimate and defensible. But they sometimes fail to fold in the reality of how far Iraq has come in the past 12 months under the surge-based strategy of Gen. David Petraeus. Most Democrats seem to belittle or even deny the progress, despite a 75% reduction in violence and the beginnings of Iraqi political compromise.
- Michael O'Hanlon of The Brookings Institute, USA Today

Both of these writers are generally left-of-center thinkers with a clear disdain for the way the Bush administration has managed the war from its 2003 inception. So how could they be so seemingly opposed in their view of the security situation in Iraq?

The first and most obvious answer is the general uncertainties of combat, even at the strategic level, often called "the fog of war." Think taking the pulse of pre-primary policial persuasions in New Hampshire is a tough task? Iraq is hundreds of times larger, hundreds of times more diverse, hundreds of times more deadly. So while day-to-day reports of violence from the streets of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra help tell the story, they are not the story. Likewise, while it is nice to have a friend or relative (or journalist, for that matter) who has "been there," it is incredibly unreliable to assume that person's view of the war is anything more than anecdotal evidence of larger themes.

At first blush, that might seem to make O'Hanlon's uber-strategic vision of Iraq (he is responsible for Brookings' Iraq Index, the largest publicly available collection of data on the war-torn nation) more reliable than Robinson's, which in this case relies upon a series of relatively recent events to warn of the potential for another storm in Mesopotamia. But the trouble with looking at large swatches of data is that smaller, telling changes can be lost inside the grander movements.

And at war, small changes are human lives.

So while a short period of violence does not neccesarily negate months of progress, it can help set the context.

In this case: Yes, the overall trends in Iraq are improved. No, the war is not over -- not by a longshot.

Labels: Iraq, journalism, statistics

Some prospectively good news out of Iraq today: Moqtada al-Sadr will have a statement read in mosques at prayer services on Friday, and some of his aides have suggested that he will call for a continuation of the six-month cease-fire that has coincided with the stark reduction of violence across Iraq.

And here are 150 reasons why Utahns should care...

150 Utah Guard members leave for year-long Middle East mission
By Matthew D. LaPlante, The Salt Lake Tribune

Nothing could make this easy.
But for families of the 150 Utah National Guard soldiers who left their homes on Wednesday for a yearlong tour of duty, there were a few points of consolation.
Most of the members of the 2-211th Aviation Battalion who departed Utah this week will, following two months of training in Oklahoma, remain in Kuwait for the duration of their service. Those from the Black Hawk helicopter unit who do cross the border, running personnel and supplies to bases in southern Iraq, will be operating in a region that has remained relatively stable throughout the war, though violent flare-ups between battling religious factions and against American and British occupiers have occurred.
But perhaps most of all, many noted, the nation of Iraq as a whole has seen marked improvements in security since the battalion's soldiers first received orders to deploy in support of the war known as Operation Iraqi Freedom.
"Things do seem to be getting a little better," said Michelle Love-Day. Her brother-in-law, Justin Day, is a Black Hawk crew member and likely will be spending plenty of time in Iraqi airspace.
The security improvements, in particular, "make me feel better," Love-Day said. "Maybe it means he'll be playing video games the whole time."
Probably not, but Day will be arriving in Iraq following a period in which U.S. casualties have substantially been reduced. None of the past four months have seen more than 35 hostile U.S. fatalities - a rate that, while still lamentable, is several times lower than during the same period, one year back. Iraqi civilian casualties also have fallen, though to what extent and from what cause is a matter of considerable debate. Either way, much of the continuing sectarian violence has occurred in Iraq's northern and eastern provinces.
There is a wild card, of sorts, in Moqtada al-Sadr, whose six-month cease-fire order to his Mahdi Army militiamen coincides with the recent reduction in violence across Iraq. That order is set to expire this week and Sadr's aides have indicated the pugnacious leader might choose not to extend it.
"Moqtada al-Sadr controls the largest political and military organization in southern Iraq," said Vali Nasr, author of The Shia Revival, and an expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "This may just be a political signal from him . . . but there's no reason to believe he is not still capable of wreaking much havoc."
Such possibilities present a dilemma for many military family members, who often are conflicted by desires to know as much as possible about the place where their loved ones are fighting and, at the same time, to be able to maintain their lives free of constant worry that comes with Iraq's never-ending parade of actual and potential problems.
"I want to find out what is happening," said Jenilee Scott of Orem, whose husband Jonathan was among the 2-211th soldiers who departed Utah on Wednesday, "but at the same time, ignorance is bliss."
Scott takes comfort in knowing that her husband's job with the 2-211th won't likely take him north of the border. But not everyone has that same comfort.
Erika Brown's husband, James, is among those who will regularly be crossing into Iraq. She is heartened knowing that "it does seem like it's getting better," but of the ups and downs of Iraq's security, she said, "I've stopped paying attention."
No matter how military families approach the war, no matter the job their loved ones do, no matter the location and no matter the security outlook, Tammy Adams said one thing was a constant for everyone huddled together one last time at the Utah Air National Guard Base in Salt Lake City.
"Maybe we're not quite as concerned for their safety" she said as she watched her husband, Pete, disappear into a sea of camouflage, "but we'll miss them, just the same."

Labels: Iraq, National Guard

It was just about a year following the battle of Najaf that I found myself at a U.S. base on the outskirts of that town. It was the week of Iraq's constitutional referendum, and while the nation was falling into chaos elsewhere, U.S. military officials were feeling optimistic about this holy Shi'ite city. Having ceded control of security within the city limits to local leaders, violence was down.

"This will be the model for the rest of Iraq," one colonel told me.

I asked him about Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi Army members had battled Marines in Najaf in August of 2004 and who now seemed to have consolidated his control of the city, even though he was still technically wanted, dead or alive, by the U.S. government.

"Sadr is just a punk," the colonel said in a bored southern drawl. "He's a gangster, not a political leader."

In the intervening years, Sadr has proved to be quite more than a punk. It was his militias that were responsible for much of the bloodshed that followed the February 2006 bombing of Samarra's Golden Mosque. And while U.S. leaders prefer to focus on the so-called "surge" as the reason for reduced violence in Iraq over the past few months, it's hard to ignore that the biggest gains in security just happen to have coincided with Sadr's August 2007 demand for a six-month cease-fire among his supporters.

Now that cease fire is about to end. And it should be disconcerting to anyone who cares about Iraq's future that U.S. leaders are once again treating Sadr like a small-time punk.

Last week, U.S. State Department Iraq coordinator David Satterfied told foreign policy gurus at the Middle East Institute that Sadr was little more than a "deeply troubled young man" who is now "beyond his ability to influence" matters in Iraq.

In the Time Magazine article reporting the remarks, Vali Nasr, author of The Shi'a Revival, sharply disagreed with Satterfield's assessment. "Moqtada al-Sadr still commands the largest social and political movement in southern Iraq," Nasr said. "The game in Iraq is not over. . . He has been beefing up his strength."

With Iraq teetering precariously on the edge of war and peace, now is not a time to be underestimating a man who could push it into oblivion.

From The Oct. 15, 2005 edition of The Salt Lake Tribune. . .

Hands off: U.S. soldiers plan to stay away from polls as Iraqis vote
By Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune
NAJAF, Iraq - As in much of Iraq today, American military officials in Najaf were trying to keep their troops as far from the polls as possible. They hope that, when the people of Iraq vote on their proposed new constitutional referendum, they will see themselves, not their occupiers, in charge.
"Our guys are going to stay completely away from that," said Col. Charlie Thornton, deputy commander for the 155th Brigade Combat Team, which oversees logistical operations in the southwestern provinces of Najaf and Karbala. "We don't want a hint of any kind of influence in this election."
Even in the relatively peaceful city of Najaf, that may be easier said than done. Allowing Iraqi police and military forces to handle security means accepting that a certain level of disorder may prevail.
To that end, U.S. military ears on Friday were waiting to hear the voice of Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Militia continues its struggle for power in the city of Najaf, some 14 months after U.S. troops killed hundreds of Mahdi fighters in a failed uprising.
Today, Sadr is a tenuous ally in the goal of passing the constitution, having expressed numerous complaints about the document but refusing, through Friday, to call for an all-out "no" vote. His Mahdi army has even offered to "protect" voting centers in and around Baghdad, and is expected to be out in force in Najaf as well.
But although Shiite support for the document has never been fully in question, officials say Sadr could play a spoiler role, were his army to clash with rival Shiite groups -- as happens occasionally here -- necessitating an American response.
Thornton, though, was optimistic as he left his office at nearby Camp Duke on Friday evening.
"If they were going to do anything, I think they would have started today," he said.
As such, the plan is to keep most American forces three tiers back -- local police and elections officials will handle areas closest to polling sites while Iraqi military units will patrol the city. U.S. forces will stay outside of Najaf's perimeter, with the exception of a small unit that can help facilitate a rapid military response in a crisis. And that, said the 106th Support Battalion operations officer, Maj. Jeff Files, will only happen "if it gets really, really bad."
Not every area of the country will be able to ensure that Iraqi voters, if they choose to head to the polls, will predominantly see Iraqi faces. The buildup of Iraqi military and police forces in some areas -- especially in the volatile, Sunni-dominated Al Anbar, Ninewa, and Salah-al-din provinces, in northwest Iraq -- have simply not progressed fast enough to make that overall goal a reality. It remains to be seen whether a deal brokered by the National Assembly with Sunni leaders Wednesday night, allowing a new parliament to adopt amendments in the constitution should it pass, will bring Sunnis to the voting booths in any of those places.
Though Iraq's largest Sunni party has now endorsed the document (its headquarters in Baghdad was bombed on Friday, presumably in retaliation for that stand) it can be scuttled if two-thirds of voters in three provinces vote no.
In other parts of Iraq, however, the fight is not to pass the document but to do so with the appearance that its passage is victory for Iraq -- not the United States. To that end, Iraqi soldiers in Najaf on Friday wore buttons calling the constitution "the unity and hope for Iraq -- one country, one future."
And Files is optimistic. "This is a process of the people, they are casting a vote, and just the participation in the process is a good thing," he said. "This should be a really good day for them."

Labels: Iraq

I first met Marshall Thompson on a long and lonely stretch of highway in central Utah. The Iraq war veteran was on day 21 of his walk across the reddest state in the nation and photographer Rick Egan and I took a day to walk along.

Thompson originally had conceived of the walk as a stunt to draw attention to a war he felt needed to be ended. But along the way, he found the long trek gave him time to think and pray about his own role in that war. And, in the end, it might have been a journey far more personally enlightening and revealing than he'd intended.

Labels: Iraq, reddest state

Word to the wise, if you're going to commit (alleged) fraud (and c'mon, who among us hasn't wanted to make like George Clooney in "Three Kings"?) it's probably best not to use your official US Army e-mail address to correspond with your wife. . .

From today's Trib:
Army Officer Curtis Whiteford was warned by his wife against taking unearned cash from a contractor in Iraq, and he promised her in an e-mail that he would end his part in the corruption, according to documents filed earlier this month in federal court.

But prosecutors allege Whiteford, a former Riverton resident, continued to accept thousands of dollars in gifts, including several unauthorized trips home to Utah. He also tried to get a contractor to buy him a sports car and authorized the purchase of weapons, using U.S. government funds, on behalf of a private security company he planned to run with other conspirators.

Whiteford, who was indicted one year ago Friday, and four others face charges of rigging bids on contracts awarded by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-led interim government of Iraq at that time, directing $8.6 million to companies owned and operated by American businessman Philip Bloom.

Whiteford has pleaded not guilty and jury selection for the case is scheduled to begin March 11 in U.S. District Court in New Jersey. Meanwhile, defense attorneys are attempting to have the case dismissed, arguing that the indicted persons were not acting as "public officials" as defined by federal statute, at the time of the alleged offenses.

The case is just one of dozens of similar stories unveiled by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which investigates fraud, waste and abuse in Iraq rebuilding projects.

But the Whiteford e-mails, which show a family struggling over the consequences of involvement in allegedly illegal acts, offer a rare glimpse into the human element of the inspector general's cases, which have involved scores of soldiers and contractors and cost the U.S. and Iraqi governments billions of dollars.

Whiteford resigned from the Utah National Guard in 2002 after an investigation of his pay records revealed "an extraordinary number of days with additional pay." But although Whiteford left the Guard under fire, he didn't resign his Army commission - and that allowed him to transfer into the Army Reserve's California-based 91st Division.

Within a year, he was back in uniform and stationed in Iraq, where he was given the authority to authorize up to $500,000 at a time in expenditures without higher permission, according to court documents.

Following one trip home, allegedly paid for by Bloom, Whiteford received an e-mail from his wife in which she expressed grave reservations about his conduct.

"I may be paranoid but I sometimes feels like every communication we have is being monitored," Carol Whiteford wrote. "The fact is that you work for the Army and are only entitled to that which you earn."

In the letter, Carol Whiteford appears to refer to the Olympic pay scandal that cost her husband, a former senior aviation administrator, his National Guard career. Whiteford was accused of, but never prosecuted for, claiming too many days of additional compensation from the Guard, even though he already had been paid in full for work he had done.

"I asked you about your comp time all the time and you said that it was OK," but, she wrote, "it was questionable. . . .

"I am tired of having my gut in a knot and I figure that I have been right before," she continued. "I just don't want to be left alone to figure out how to house, feed and clothe all these kids with you in the klink. I scares me to death."

The Whitefords, who at the time had been married for nearly 30 years, have eight children.

In response, Curtis Whiteford wrote to his wife that there was "no need to fear," according to the court documents. "After being home with you and discussing the situation I decided on my own to not use any unearned $ again."

But prosecutors allege that through much of the following year, Whiteford continued to help steer contracts to Bloom, worked to procure licenses for Bloom to open a new Baghdad airline and used U.S. funds to purchase weapons, including several rocket launchers, for the security company he planned to open which was to be called Anaconda.

The "key objectives of the company," Whiteford allegedly wrote in an e-mail to the others involved in the case, "are making money while allowing us to look cool and have cool stuff."

A woman who answered the phone at Whiteford's listed number in Box Elder County said Whiteford was not available and said that information about the case that previously had been reported was untrue. She declined to cite specifics, however and would not provide her name.

Labels: Iraq, lessons

Surge (verb): to rise and fall.

From today's New York Times:
White House Shows Signs Of Rethinking Cut In Troops
Four months after announcing troop reductions in Iraq, President Bush is now sending signals that the cuts may not continue past this summer, a development likely to infuriate Democrats and renew concerns among military planners about strains on the force. Bush has made no decisions on troop reductions to follow those he announced last September. But White House officials said Bush had been taking the opportunity, as he did in Monday's State of the Union address, to prepare Americans for the possibility that, when he leaves office a year from now, the military presence in Iraq will be just as large as it was a year ago, or even slightly larger.

Falter (verb): to not go straight.

Labels: Iraq

Another soldier's blog fell silent this week. Andrew Olmsted, who blogged at www.andrewolmsted.com and for the Rocky Mountain News was killed in a firefight Thursday alongside another soldier in As Sadiyah, Iraq.

In his final post Olsmted asked "that no one try to use my death to further their political purposes. . ."

"I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn't a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side. If you think the U.S. should stay in Iraq, don't drag me into it by claiming that somehow my death demands us staying in Iraq. If you think the U.S. ought to get out tomorrow, don't cite my name as an example of someone's life who was wasted by our mission in Iraq. I have my own opinions about what we should do about Iraq, but since I'm not around to expound on them I'd prefer others not try and use me as some kind of moral capital to support a position I probably didn't support."

Labels: Iraq, The Fallen

The Bush administration said last fall that it had prioritized the entry into the United States of some 12,000 Iraqi refugees.

But according to the Washington Post, the number of Iraqis let into this country is sliding -- "from 450 in October to 362 in November and 245 in December." And that means "the administration will have to allow in 10,943 Iraqis over the next nine months, or roughly 1,215 per month, to meet the target it has set for itself."

The problem? Bureaucracy, administration officials say.

Lack of political leadership and willpower to do what is right, administration critics counter.

Here's the Post's story.

Labels: Bush, Iraq, refugees

Harper's Magazine's contributing blogger Scott Horton, an international law and human rights expert, writes this week about Iraqi journalist Bilal Hussein, a Pulitzer-winning photographer who was held without charge by U.S. forces in Iraq for nearly two years before being presented to the Iraqi courts for prosecution earlier this month.

According to Horton's source in the Pentagon, there is a stringent gag order on the case in Iraq, as ordered by U.S. military prosecutors (how very American!)

Among other allegations in the Horton piece:

- Although the U.S. has no prosecutorial standing in an Iraqi court, the military has assigned a team of five military lawyers to the case. And circumstantial evidence seems to suggest that one of the prosecutors is Capt. Kevin Calvey, a Republican former state representative and National Guard officer from Oklahoma who is currently in Baghdad, from where, Calvey writes in his blog, detainees have a right to a twice-yearly "legal review" of their case, and "that's about it. That's all the rights to which such detainees are entitled. Not a full-blown trial."

- Bilal, who remains in U.S. custody, has been prevented from adequate and unmonitored access to his American counsel (who should, in fact, have standing in Bilal's case, under Iraqi law.)

- The U.S. is planning to use secret witnesses, who will testify against Bilal via remote network camera, preventing any meaningful cross examination.

I obviously cannot vouch for Horton's anonymous source (you should read his entire piece here.) But given the precedents already set in this case, it wouldn't be terribly surprising to learn that the U.S. military has set up a kangaroo court under which to try Bilal.

Yet even in a kangaroo court, Bilal is being given an opportunity that many thousands of Iraqis, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time in this frontless war, have not been granted by U.S. forces and their insurgent foes. However stacked against him the deck may be, he might at least be given a chance to tell his side of the story. And with international pressure building, there is a chance, however slight, that Bilal ultimately will receive the fair trial he deserves.

As I wrote back in September of 2006:

I certainly did not get to know Bilal well enough to say whether he crossed over the lines of ethical reporting in a way that gave aid to the insurgency. Did he give away American troop positions to Iraqi insurgents? Did he help plot attacks? Did he stand as a lookout for the rebels as U.S. convoys approached the location of a roadside bomb?

. . . If U.S. or Iraqi officials have evidence supporting the claim that Bilal is a security threat, he should be charged, he should be tried and, if found guilty, he should be punished.

But although I remain hopeful that justice -- whatever justice truly is in this case -- might prevail, I am extremely doubtful. For this case is no longer about Bilal Hussein. Rather, it is about the very way our nation walks the walk when it comes to our intentions in Iraq.

At the moment, the U.S. military appears to be treating the Iraqi court system as its executioner de facto.

And that is the mark of an occupier, not a liberator.

Labels: Bilal Hussein, Iraq

McClatchy Newspapers military columnist Joe Galloway writes this week,"The next smarmy politician who shouts, 'God bless our troops' ought to be tarred and feathered and ridden out of Washington on a rail for sheer hypocrisy."

I rise to take exception to my esteemed colleagues' words, not because I am capable of identifying a single person in Washington D.C. who shouldn't be ridden out on a rail, but because in this republic, none of us has the moral luxury of distancing ourselves from those who represent us in our nation's capital.

So long as we're getting out the tar and feathers, let us get out enough for all of us.

For all of us, including those of us in the media, who let the fear, hurt and rage we felt following the attacks of Sept. 11 to overwhelm our civic judgment and moral duty, as citizens, to question the motives of militaristic leaders.

For all of us who supported a headfirst dive into war with a nation that did not attack us.

For all of us who now seek a historic retreat from battlefields on which thousands of our service members have fallen and without thought of or compassion for those Iraqis we shall leave behind.

For all of us who still cannot identify Iraq or Afghanistan on a map of this planet. For shame.

For all of us -- and surveys show there are many -- who do not even know that we remain at war in Afghanistan.

For all of us who spent more time this week talking about the fate of Britney's latest baby than the fate of hundreds of thousands of American service members.

For all of us who believe we must continue to fight, but believe our own children are too good to join the military.

For all of us who accepted that "you go to war with the Army you have" allowing the flow of armored vehicles to our troops to continue at a slow trickle rather than a wartime rush.

For all of us who believe that "against this war from the start" exempts us from an obligation to care about those who fight this war today.

For all of us who, by not demanding adequate and accessible mental health care, are allowing yet another generation of veterans to go quietly into the darkness of post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, homelessness and suicide.

For all of us who slapped a magnetic yellow ribbon on the back of our car, but have not so much as bothered to call our elected representatives to demand greater funding and oversight for the facilities that care for returning service members.

For all of us who have made our nation's ongoing war the "second or third most important issues" in the 2008 election.

While Mr. Galloway correctly has identified that our politicians spend far more time talking about supporting troops than doing so, his assignment of blame incorrectly lets the rest of us off the hook.

In this republic, our leaders take their marching orders from We, The People.

And We, The People are doing a shameful job in caring for — or even caring about — our troops and our veterans.

Labels: Afghanistan, Iraq, veterans

From the Washington Post (on page A18!?). . .


Poll Shows More Optimism On War
Discontent about the war in Iraq easing, with Republicans and independents significantly more positive about the situation than they were 12 months ago.

More Americans are supporting the war? A turn around of years of downtrends in public opinion? That's an A-1 story.

Sigh.

Labels: Iraq

File this under "tertiary consequences of war". . .

Illiteracy Is On The Rise As Iraqi Refugees Can't Afford School
Illiteracy is spreading among refugee children from Iraq, with at least 300,000 young Iraqis not attending school in the countries where their families sought safety.
Miami Herald, December 12, 2007

Labels: Iraq, statistics

Among the places Jon Huntsman Jr. visited in Iraq with John McCain was a detention facility where, Huntsman said, McCain wanted to make sure "there was not torture taking place."

President Bush, of course, says the United States doesn't torture. So does McCain know something we don't?

Under questioning, Huntsman backed away from his earlier comment, saying that McCain -- a former prisoner of war and harsh critic of the administration's rather wishy-washy stand on interrogation techniques of dubious legality -- really just wanted to make sure interrogators "were abiding by the military handbook."

Huntsman danced over several other issues during an hour-long press briefing on Monday:

-- Testifying before Congress, recently, Gen. David Petraeus said he didn't know whether the war in Iraq was making U.S. citizens safer. After meeting with Petraeus in Iraq, Huntsman was asked whether he thought the war in iraq was making the U.S. safer.

"Our own state is safe," Huntsman said.

On the issue of whether the U.S. was safer, Huntsman said he would have to defer to Petraeus.

In other words: "I don't know."

-- Huntsman stayed overnight at the “heavily fortified” U.S. embassy compound in Baghdad. According to a recent United Nations investigation, that embassy is guarded by armed security guards from a number of third-world nations, some of whom are making as little as $31 a day to risk their lives to keep American soldiers, diplomats -- and visiting dignitaries -- safe.

Having run an embassy himself -- Huntsman is former ambassador to Singapore -- the governor said he was aware that contractors are sometimes used to provide security, though he stopped short of acknowledging the exploitive wages that are paid to contractors/mercenaries from Fiji, Peru, Honduras and other impoverished nations.

"What should the policy going forward be?" Huntsman asked.

He didn't answer himself.

-- This was Huntman's second trip to Iraq alongside McCain. Though political observers say Huntsman is vying for an ambassadorship (rhymes with Mynah) in a McCain administration, the governor said he was simply invited as "a friend" and a governor who sees things differently than another congressman might.

If you were going to war, which Western states governor would you invite along?

Jon Huntsman Jr.
Bill Richardson
Janet Napolitano
Arnold Schwarzenegger

Yup, that's what I thought.

Labels: Iraq

Dr. John Zaugg and Dr. Tate Viehweg sent this photo from Iraq, where the University of Utah graduates are working at the Ibn Sina Hospital in Baghdad (of Baghdad ER fame.)

Ibn Sina is the busiest military hospital in theater, but the two Ute fans found some time to pose with what appears to be as hand-crafted Utah banner.

Any Cougar fans in the Holy Land or Afghanistan?

Send a photo and your story to military@sltrib.com

Labels: Afghanistan, Iraq

Sure, the security situation in Baghdad is getting better, but Congressional Democrats seem just gleeful to point out that the original intention of the surge, to provide "breathing room" for political settlement, has not worked.

Meanwhile, we're nearing the 11th hour and Congress can't get together with the White House to provide a basic budget for U.S. troops.

Um... Hello pot. I'm a kettle. You're black.

I propose we all agree to agree on the following:

1) The security situation in Baghdad and most of the rest of Iraq has improved since the surge.
2) People are still dying, by the scores, which means the security situation in Baghdad and most of Iraq is not "good."
3) Money makes the world (and especially the Pentagon) go 'round.
4) U.S. troops should not be left fundless and in harm's way.
5) It's blatantly wrong to suggest that U.S. troops will be left fundless and in harm's way unless that is the honest-to-God truth.
6) There needs to be a political solution in Iraq.
7) Political solutions, as America's leaders have been so kind to show us over the past few weeks, are difficult and take time -- even when people aren't dying.

Discuss.

Labels: Bush, Congress, Iraq

I've always been skeptical of the stories of Vietnam War veterans who claim to have been spit on, say they had rotten fruit thrown at them, or profess to have been violently attacked upon their return from the war.

I'm not saying it never happened. But I can't find anyone in the anti-war community who will claim to have participated in this sort of behavior. Of course, I don't find that considerably surprising. What I do find odd is that I've also never seen a single police report, firsthand news account or segment of video footage documenting it. Sociologist (and Vietnam War veteran) Jerry Lembcke has written a fascinating book on the subject and there is a tidy synopsis of his conclusions here.

But despite Lembcke's observations and research, and my own personal misgivings, I couldn't help but think about what our nation's Vietnam War vets must have gone through as I read the comments on our Sunday story about the difficulty that Iraq war veteran Ozro Hamblin had readjusting to "normal" life after returning from the war, and his decision to go back to Iraq.

"So Hamblin is addicted to slaughter?" one reader asked.

"The cowboy type of Soldier" another added.

Another: "This kind of person evidently has no concience about the Iraqi innocents that are slaughterd and maimed."

And another: "Hamblin and those like him are much of the reason we have wars."

It's a big literal step from insulting a soldier to spitting on one. But it's not a big proverbial one. Though it doesn't appear that any of these folks have walked a single mile in Hamblin's combat boots, they spit on him just the same.

I can't help but think that part of this is my fault. See, I like Hamblin. Here's a guy whose Army commander tells me was one of his brightest and best soldiers. He speaks several languages and is as adept at discussing world culture and politics as he is at moving bulldozers. And yes, after the war, he's had some trouble adjusting to the slow pace of civilian life, so much so that he volunteered to go back. To the extent that I wasn't able to convey the psychological depth of that decision in a way that would make people think twice before calling him a cowboy, I suppose I have failed.

Thing is -- and I know this is not a popular opinion -- I do believe that soldiers share some accountability for the wars our nation fights. We are a species of free will. And while there are consequences for refusing to participate in a war in which you morally or philosophically disagree, I don't think the specter of those consequences -- a bad conduct discharge, in most cases -- forgives anyone of that accountability.

But nor do I think that opens spitting season on service members. I've seen no evidence that Hamblin did anything less than what was ordered of him in a climate in which he believed those orders to be lawful. In fact, having spent some time with Hamblin in Iraq, it is my observation that in fact his efforts likely saved the lives of innocent Iraqis.

In any case, and in absence of any evidence that Hamblin or others like him are worthy of your contempt, I think it is fair to give them the benefit of the doubt that their aims are just and their motives are noble.

Labels: Coming Home, Iraq, veterans

By 8 a.m. this morning, this comment was on the story I penned about Utah's views about President Bush and the war in Iraq . . .

"LaPlante; you can always count on him to come out of the woodwork to promote "cut & run" and undermine the U.S. efforts in the battle against Muslim extremists. We knew he would be out there lurking, still trying to hide the progress being made in the middle east and the war against terror."

And this one was in my e-mail inbox. . .

Your reporting was less than skeptical, to put ot kindly. You appear to have swallowed the Bush talking points.

Labels: Iraq

Iraq's civilian body count fell to 758 in October -- a sharp decline from earliers this year. U.S. troop deaths also were down, with 38 fatalities acknowledged so far by the military last month, the lowest figure since March 2006.

So the surge worked, right?

Maybe.

As explained in the Los Angeles Times today...

American commanders credit the buildup, which reached full strength in June, with slowing sectarian bloodshed.

They say the decision to send 28,500 more troops to Iraq has made a difference by allowing them to send soldiers to live on the fault lines between Sunni Arab and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, and to conduct sweeping offensives in provinces east and south of the capital against strongholds of Shiite Muslim militias and Sunni militants linked to foreign insurgents.

But others say that the picture is more complicated than that because those seeking to cleanse their neighborhoods of rival religious sects have largely succeeded.

"Everyone in our neighborhood is Sunni, even the birds flying above us are Sunni," said Mohammed Azzawi, a resident of the once mixed district of Ghazaliya.

I've been watching these sad statistics for long enough to know not to think too much of "good" months (the last time the U.S. troop death toll was this low, was followed by nearly two years of incredible bloodshed) or "bad" months (the worst months, on paper, are often times in which U.S. troops suffer a few large losses in a single battle, attack or helicopter crash, not nessessarily when insurgent attacks are up.) Neither extreme truly indicates things are going well or poorly -- it is simply far more complicated than that.

In any case, with 758 Iraqi civilians and 38 American troops still just recently taken from this Earth, I'm not prepared to celebrate anything. Iraq's population is rouhly one-tenth of that in the United States. If we had experienced a month like they just had, we would have lost nearly 8,000 of our citizens in sectarian violence.

Yes, there is a civil war in Iraq. And yes, it goes on.

Labels: Iraq, statistics

I first met Lee Kelley in Ramadi, Iraq, in the fall of 2005. A native of New Orleans, Lee was telling me about how his parents were weathering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when his commanding officer zoomed past.

"Ask Lee about his blog," the CO said.

"Your blog?" I asked.

"Yeah," Lee said. He seemed to shrink into his uniform. "I've got a blog. I do some writing. You could look at it if you'd like. It's nothing special."

Lee Kelley is a liar. His blog was something special. And as testament to that, nearly two years after he returned from duty in Iraq, his blog entries are still being e-mailed, linked to and published in various compilations of the writings of military bloggers. Since returning from the war, Lee has been trying to parlay those successes into a writing career. (You can click here to read a story I wrote last December about Lee's efforts to reinvent himself as a professional writer.)

Doonesbury creator G.B. Trudeau's newly released blog compendium "The Sandbox," includes five of Lee's blog entries from his time in Iraq that have been published on Trudeau's website.

Trudeau has been the poster boy for those who say it is indeed possible to support the troops without supporting the war. Well-known for the liberal political bent of his cartoons, Trudeau's love for this nation's warriors permeates through his comic strip and on his Website.

Lee's a poster boy of a different kind: A war-veteran-turned-single-father who, like many, is trying to figure out what his post-military life will look like. You can read his journal from Iraq -- and its aftermath -- at www.wordsmithatwar.blog-city.com

Labels: blogs, Iraq

Last week, I wrote about soldier Stacey Olson, a single mother who had to leave her kids with her mother when she was deployed to Iraq in 2005.

Reintegrating herself into her children's life after she returned has been difficult for Stacey, but at least she didn't have to go to court to get them back, as has been the case for many other military parents, according to this report, from ABC News.

Here's the story about Stacey and her children, which is the first part of a series of profiles The Tribune is producing on women in the military. . .

It was 10 years ago that Stacey Olson found herself sleeping on an old mattress in her mother's cluttered basement.

She had an associate's degree and a daughter in kindergarten. A few jobs, but no career. She had been on welfare and food stamps.

"My life was basically going nowhere," Olson remembered of the day she impulsively marched into an Army National Guard recruiter's office and enlisted. "I was a nasty, miserable person and I didn't feel like there were any other options for me."

Today, the 36-year-old mother of three has a nice, new suburban home and a career she is proud of. The military, for which she works full time at the Utah National Guard's Draper headquarters, paid her to get a bachelor's degree. She drills one Saturday and one Sunday each month - the rest are three-day weekends. At a time when even two-income families often are struggling with health care costs, she doesn't worry. Last month, following hysterectomy surgery, she took several weeks off of work - all paid - to recover, "and I could have taken more," she said.

Yes, life is good in ways Olson couldn't have imagined 10 years ago. But there have been sacrifices.

Big sacrifices.

In the next few weeks, the Defense Department is expected to release its annual count of the number of women in the military. And if the past five years are any indication, it will be reporting fewer female service members. As a percentage of the total force, the number of women in uniform has fallen every year since peaking just above 15 percent in 2002, a year in which U.S. troops began to see significant and permanent changes in the time they were being asked to be away from home.

The accelerating cycle of deployments - what the military calls "operational tempo" - can be especially difficult on single parents. And in the Army, one in seven female enlisted soldiers is a single parent.

That's more than twice the rate of male soldiers, and it might help explain the declining number of female soldiers.

In the event of a deployment, the Army discharges single parents who can't or won't arrange for custody of their children to be transferred to another parent. And Army data suggest female troopers with children are less likely to reenlist than those without kids.

But Olson - who has added a son and another daughter to her family since enlisting in 1997 - never saw her children as a reason to leave the military. Rather, she saw them as a reason to stay in.

Olson is not ashamed of her choices in life. Not for having her children. And not for leaving them when she has been asked to do so by her country.

Sitting last week in the spacious kitchen of her home in a new subdivision on the west side of Lehi, Olson said she doubts that she would be able to provide a similar quality of life for her children if she were to leave the service.

"The benefits alone - how would I find that anywhere else?" she said. "I can't see getting out now."

But that doesn't mean its been easy. Immediately after enlisting, Olson had to leave her daughter to attend basic training. In the intervening decade, she has left her kids for several other training assignments, often for months at a time. And in 2005, she was ordered to Iraq. She was gone for a year and a half.

Working out of a dusty tent at Camp Duke, on the outskirts of the city of Najaf, Olson kept photos and drawings of her children on her desk. She called home as frequently as she could. But it wasn't easy to be a mom from thousands of miles away, especially to a daughter who, then 13 years old, was beginning to test her limits.

Brooklyn Olson said she had trouble accepting her mother's war deployment, which forced her to switch schools, adjust to her grandmother's parenting style and share living space with her cousins, who also were being cared for by her grandmother.

"It was awful," Brooklyn said. "I hated every minute of it. I've never really had a father. My mom's the only thing I ever had. And then she was gone."

For her part, Stacey Olson said she felt bad for putting her mother in the position of having to parent her children - especially as Brooklyn was "blossoming into the social butterfly she is now," Olson laughed.

"My mom had to be the bad guy," she said. "She couldn't just be grandma and play with the kids and then send them home."

And from Iraq, Olson couldn't do much to help.

"It would get to the place where things were going crazy back home and there was nothing I could do about it out there," Stacey Olson said. "I melted down a couple of times."

But what Olson called "meltdowns," Budd Vogrinec called "perfectly normal." Vogrinec, the commander of the unit in which Olson served in Iraq, said Olson never let her problems at home affect her work.

"Her daughter was acting out. Her mother was stressed about it. And she was having trouble dealing with it," Vogrinec recalled of a day when, after chewing Olson out for giving him an incomplete manning roster, he learned that she had left the office upset. "But Stacey was a total professional. If I hadn't been told, I would have never known."

And, Vogrinec said, if Olson hadn't been such a valued soldier, he wouldn't have bothered to track her down to apologize for being overly critical. "I don't make it a point to show my soldiers I have a heart," he said. "Not unless they deserve to know it."

Olson has encouraged Brooklyn - now 15 years old and beginning to contemplate her post-high school life - to consider a military career. Brooklyn has shot the idea down outright. "I hate the Army," she said. "There's no way. No way I'd join."

Meanwhile, Olson said, she worries about what effect the deployment had on her son, Michael, who was 5 years old when she left.

Now 7, Michael said he still isn't sure what to make of the time his mother was away. "In my brain, it always seems like it was just yesterday that she was gone," he said. "I don't know why that is."

Olson said she worries about Michael, who sometimes struggles to contain his anger. "I've thought about counseling," she said. "It probably would be a good idea."

Now with a 1-year-old daughter, Hailey, Olson said she also worries about what another deployment would do to her family.

But the Army's been good to her, she said, and she will accept the orders as they come and without complaint.

That, she said, is what soldiers do.

Labels: deployments, Iraq, Women in the Military

Have the folks at Hill Air Force Base seemed busier in the past year?

Here's one reason why, from USA Today...

The U.S. military has increased airstrikes in Iraq fivefold this year, reflecting a steep escalation in combat operations aimed at al-Qaida and other militants. Coalition forces launched 1,140 airstrikes in the first nine months of this year, compared with 229 in all of last year, according to military statistics. Airstrikes are up on Afghanistan, too. Coalition planes have made 2,764 bombing runs so far this year, up from 1,770 last year.

Labels: Afghanistan, Air Power, Hill Air Force Base, Iraq

About 40 soldiers from the 141st Military Intelligence Battalion will return to Utah on Friday following 13 months of service in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The unit deployed Sept. 11, 2006, and provided intelligence support to Coalition forces in Baghdad, Iraq. Soldiers arrived at Fort Dix, N.J., earlier this week and have been undergoing demobilization processing, according to a National Guard statement.

The return of the 141st brings to approximately 700 the number of Airmen and Soldiers serving overseas from the Utah National Guard. Units currently deployed include the 109th Air Control Squadron, 116th Convoy Security Company and 1-145th Field Artillery, all supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Meanwhile, several Guard units are currently in pre-deployment training, including the 142nd Military Intelligence Battalion, which is set to deploy for its second war tour later this spring.

Labels: deployments, Iraq, National Guard

Pvt. Nathan Z. Thacker, 18, of Greenbrier, Ark., was killed Friday in Kirkuk, Iraq, in an improvised explosive device attack. Thacker was the 33rd 18-year-old soldier to die in Iraq.

To date, 668 U.S. service members -- including eight Utahns -- have died in Iraq prior to their 22nd birthday, and 3,027 have died before turning 31.

Labels: Iraq, The Fallen

Stymied at the UN and unable even to move a smaller group of NATO nations into his camp, President Bush defiantly called the contingent of 300,000 soldiers from dozens of nations supporting his invasion of Iraq a "coalition of the willing."

Even then, Bush was mocked over the somewhat uninspiring collection of war powers (among those he included in his coalition were military superpowers Azerbaijan, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Latvia, Macedonia, Slovakia and Uzbekistan).

Most nations didn't send any actual combat fighters. And many of those who did send troops sent them in the dozens, rather than in the hundreds or thousands.

Still, according to the AP today, "excluding Americans, the multinational force was once 50,000 strong."

But by mid-2008, the AP reports, it will be down to 7,000.

About a year ago, I wrote a profile of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose bold words at the beginning of the war in Iraq were returning to haunt him.

Invoking the spirit of Winston Churchill as he visited U.S. troops in Iraq shortly after the successful and much-lauded invasion, Rumsfeld quipped, "never have so many been so wrong about so much."

Pat Towell at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments observed that the problem with making such bold statements, is that "if the situation goes south on you, you may have a shortfall of friends."

From "Mission Accomplished" to "bring it on" to "a coalition of the willing," the Bush administration has a problem with bold statements.

And now -- even as the security situation in Iraq is showing some signs of improvement -- it is finding itself with a shortfall of friends.

Churchill was a bold speaker, but he knew the power of allies. And in Britain's darkest hours, the relationships he formed with those allies saved his nation.

Where are America's friends in its time of need? They're going home.

Labels: Iraq, lessons

The New York Times Wednesday had a helluva good report on the Blackwater incident at Nisour Square in Baghdad, which helps illuminate just how chaotic things were on that day.

It also illustrates quite well the point I attempted to make in an article in today's Tribune about the experiences of a group of airmen from Hill Air Force Base who returned Tuesday from a seven-month tour of duty at Iraq's largest prison, Camp Bucca.

They'd arrived feeling one way about the people incarcerated at Bucca. Many returned home feeling very different.

"What did you learn about the prisoners that you didn't know when you arrived?" I asked one young airman, Michael Smith of Lancaster, Calif.

Smith thought for a bit and then answered.

"That they're people," he said.

Even in war... nay, especially in war... things are not often black and white.

Here's the full article from the 75th homecoming...


The swarm of prisoners through which they slogged, day after day, included jihadists and insurgents, militiamen and murderers. And in their presence, the 45 airmen of the 75th Security Forces learned that some men will stop at nothing to kill Americans.
But that, of course, they already knew. They had been warned.
Here is what many were not so prepared for:
"All of them aren't bad," said Willie Coffey, a tall, reflective Air Force sergeant from Milwaukee who was among the small unit of airmen-turned-prison guards that returned to Utah from a seven month tour of duty in Iraq on Tuesday night.
"Just like in an American prison, not everyone who gets locked up is guilty," Coffey said.
In fact, Bucca is unlike any American prison. Due process in Iraq, some airmen darkly joked, is making it to the prison alive. Once there, the troopers insisted, the detainees were treated within the bounds of the Geneva Conventions.
But judges? Juries? Lawyers? No.
The seven months in which the Hill Air Force Base airmen stood guard at Iraq's largest prison coincided with a surge in security operations across the war-torn nation. The prison's population exploded from 13,000 to approximately 20,000 inmates.
"Some of them were just in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Sarah Colwell, an airman from South Carolina.
"None of them have been convicted," sighed Randall Disch, a native of Arkansas. "There are some innocent ones."
From 7,000 miles away, it's easy to lump everyone captured by U.S. and Iraqi forces into the convenient category of "insurgent." But standing right beside those individuals, Disch found it much harder.
"There was visitation," he said. "And sometimes it wouldn't work out and there would be cancellations and disappointment. You could see that. And you couldn't help but feel bad for them.
"But," Disch noted after a pause, "you still can't trust any of them."
Iraq is, after all, a place where the enemy does not wear a uniform, where bombs come out of the road and where death can fall from the sky - as it did on May 14.
That, Steven Burr remembered, was the day a rocket landed in a prison compound, killing six inmates and wounding dozens of others.
The Missouri native watched fellow service members drop their weapons to help the wounded prisoners.
"One guy I saw in the back of a five-ton with 30 detainees," Burr remembered. "He was just giving them aid. He was there in the middle of them with no weapon, just helping to save their lives."
He wasn't the only one watching. The Iraqi prisoners were, too.
"And I don't know - I don't - but I think that changed the way they saw us, too."

Labels: Hill Air Force Base, Iraq