History > 2006 > USA > War > Iraq (III)

Mike Thompson

Detroit, Michigan        The Detroit Free Press        Cagle        6.9.2006
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/thompson.asp

Army deserter back in U.S.,

faces uncertainty

Sat Sep 30, 2006 8:52 PM ET
Reuters
By Lynne Olver

FORT ERIE, Ontario (Reuters) - After nearly two years in Canada, U.S. Army deserter Darrell Anderson rode over the Peace Bridge into New York state on Saturday and headed for Kentucky where he will turn himself in to military authorities, he said.

"It feels good to be back in the United States," he said by cell phone in Ohio. "It's been a long time."

Anderson, 24, had been in Toronto after deserting while home on leave in early 2005 when his unit, the 1st Armored Divison, had completed its Iraq tour of duty.

But after a life in the underground, with an uncertain future for himself and his new Canadian wife, he said he would rather surrender than live in limbo in Canada.

Anderson said he intended to turn himself in on Tuesday at the Fort Knox, Kentucky, army base.

He told Reuters he had been "at ease" crossing the U.S. border and was only worried when his wife, Gail Greer, was briefly detained by officials before being allowed into the United States.

Anderson said he showed U.S. border agents his proper identification and was not challenged.

Anderson served for seven months as a specialist in Iraq and received a Purple Heart after being wounded by a roadside bomb.

He said on Saturday he wants to put on his uniform and tell the army of his opposition to the Iraq war.

"I believed it was my human right to choose not to kill innocent people," he told about 20 supporters at an Ontario gathering before heading home.

"After my tour of duty, I believed that there was no way I could return to Iraq and follow orders without killing innocent people," Anderson said.

But staying in Canada meant no work permit or health-care coverage. He initially tried to make a claim for refugee status, as have other U.S. deserters, but a paperwork glitch prevented his case from being heard.

His attorney, James Fennerty, said he expected Anderson would be kept for up to five days at the Fort Knox base before receiving some type of discharge. Fennerty said a Fort Knox official told him last week there would be no court-martial.

"We have reached an (oral) agreement that I hope is going to be honored when we get there," Fennerty said.

Gini Sinclair, a media relations officer at Fort Knox, said on Friday a military investigator may recommend the soldier return to duty, receive a discharge, or go to court-martial.

About two dozen U.S. Army deserters who left because of the Iraq war are formally seeking refugee status in Canada, without success so far, said Lee Zaslofsky of the War Resisters Support Campaign in Toronto.

    Army deserter back in U.S., faces uncertainty, R, 30.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-10-01T005230Z_01_N29408640_RTRUKOC_0_US-DESERTER-USA.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-2

New Woodward Book Says Bush Ignored Urgent Warning on Iraq

September 29, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

Correction Appended

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter and author. The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war.

The warning is described in “State of Denial,” scheduled for publication on Monday by Simon & Schuster. The book says President Bush’s top advisers were often at odds among themselves, and sometimes were barely on speaking terms, but shared a tendency to dismiss as too pessimistic assessments from American commanders and others about the situation in Iraq.

As late as November 2003, Mr. Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.”

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq — a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.

The book, bought by a reporter for The New York Times at retail price in advance of its official release, is the third that Mr. Woodward has written chronicling the inner debates in the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent decision to invade Iraq. Like Mr. Woodward’s previous works, the book includes lengthy verbatim quotations from conversations and describes what senior officials are thinking at various times, without identifying the sources for the information.

Mr. Woodward writes that his book is based on “interviews with President Bush’s national security team, their deputies, and other senior and key players in the administration responsible for the military, the diplomacy, and the intelligence on Iraq.” Some of those interviewed, including Mr. Rumsfeld, are identified by name, but neither Mr. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney agreed to be interviewed, the book says.

Robert D. Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council, is said to have issued his warning about the need for more troops in a lengthy memorandum sent to Ms. Rice. The book says Mr. Blackwill’s memorandum concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed.

It says that Mr. Blackwill and L. Paul Bremer III, then the top American official in Iraq, later briefed Ms. Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, about the pressing need for more troops during a secure teleconference from Iraq. It says the White House did nothing in response.

The book describes a deep fissure between Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s first secretary of state, and Mr. Rumsfeld: When Mr. Powell was eased out after the 2004 elections, he told Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, that “if I go, Don should go,” referring to Mr. Rumsfeld.

Mr. Card then made a concerted effort to oust Mr. Rumsfeld at the end of 2005, according to the book, but was overruled by President Bush, who feared that it would disrupt the coming Iraqi elections and operations at the Pentagon.

Vice President Cheney is described as a man so determined to find proof that his claim about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was accurate that, in the summer of 2003, his aides were calling the chief weapons inspector, David Kay, with specific satellite coordinates as the sites of possible caches. None resulted in any finds.

Two members of Mr. Bush’s inner circle, Mr. Powell and the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, are described as ambivalent about the decision to invade Iraq. When Mr. Powell assented, reluctantly, in January 2003, Mr. Bush told him in an Oval Office meeting that it was “time to put your war uniform on,” a reference to his many years in the Army.

Mr. Tenet, the man who once told Mr. Bush that it was a “slam-dunk” that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq, apparently did not share his qualms about invading Iraq directly with Mr. Bush, according to Mr. Woodward’s account.

Mr. Woodward’s first two books about the Bush administration, “Bush at War” and “Plan of Attack,” portrayed a president firmly in command and a loyal, well-run team responding to a surprise attack and the retaliation that followed. As its title indicates, “State of Denial” follows a very different storyline, of an administration that seemed to have only a foggy notion that early military success in Iraq had given way to resentment of the occupiers.

The 537-page book describes tensions among senior officials from the very beginning of the administration. Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda.

On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.

In the weeks before the Iraq war began, President Bush’s parents did not share his confidence that the invasion of Iraq was the right step, the book recounts. Mr. Woodward writes about a private exchange in January 2003 between Mr. Bush’s mother, Barbara Bush, the former first lady, and David L. Boren, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Bush family friend.

The book says Mrs. Bush asked Mr. Boren whether it was right to be worried about a possible invasion of Iraq, and then to have confided that the president’s father, former President George H. W. Bush, “is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it; he’s up at night worried.”

The book describes an exchange in early 2003 between Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired officer Mr. Bush appointed to administer postwar Iraq, and President Bush and others in the White House situation room. It describes senior war planners as having been thoroughly uninterested in the details of the postwar mission.

After General Garner finished his PowerPoint presentation — which included his plan to use up to 300,000 troops of the Iraqi Army to help secure postwar Iraq, the book says — there were no questions from anyone in the situation room, and the president gave him a rousing sendoff.

But it was General Garner who was soon removed, in favor of Mr. Bremer, whose actions in dismantling the Iraqi army and removing Baathists from office were eventually disparaged within the government.

The book suggests that senior intelligence officials were caught off guard in the opening days of the war when Iraqi civilian fighters engaged in suicide attacks against armored American forces, the first hint of the deadly insurgent attacks to come.

In a meeting with Mr. Tenet of the Central Intelligence Agency, several Pentagon officials talked about the attacks, the book says. It says that Mr. Tenet acknowledged that he did not know what to make of them.

Mr. Rumsfeld reached into political matters at the periphery of his responsibilities, according to the book. At one point, Mr. Bush traveled to Ohio, where the Abrams battle tank was manufactured. Mr. Rumsfeld phoned Mr. Card to complain that Mr. Bush should not have made the visit because Mr. Rumsfeld thought the heavy tank was incompatible with his vision of a light and fast military of the future. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Card believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was “out of control.”

The fruitless search for unconventional weapons caused tension between Vice President Cheney’s office, the C.I.A. and officials in Iraq. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Kay, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, e-mailed top C.I.A. officials directly in the summer of 2003 with his most important early findings.

At one point, when Mr. Kay warned that it was possible the Iraqis might have had the capability to make such weapons but did not actually produce them, waiting instead until they were needed, the book says he was told by John McLaughlin, the C.I.A.’s deputy director: “Don’t tell anyone this. This could be upsetting. Be very careful. We can’t let this out until we’re sure.”

Mr. Cheney was involved in the details of the hunt for illicit weapons, the book says. One night, Mr. Woodward wrote, Mr. Kay was awakened at 3 a.m. by an aide who told him Mr. Cheney’s office was on the phone. It says Mr. Kay was told that Mr. Cheney wanted to make sure he had read a highly classified communications intercept picked up from Syria indicating a possible location for chemical weapons.

Mr. Woodward and a colleague, Carl Bernstein, led The Post’s reporting during Watergate, and Mr. Woodward has since written a string of best sellers about Washington. More recently, the identity of Mr. Woodward’s Watergate source known as Deep Throat was disclosed as having been W. Mark Felt, a senior F.B.I. official.

In late 2005, Mr. Woodward was subpoenaed by the special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case. He also apologized to The Post’s executive editor for concealing for more than two years that he had been drawn into the scandal.

Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington, and Julie Bosman from New York.

Correction: Sept. 30, 2006

A front-page article yesterday about a new book by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, which describes divisions in the Bush administration over the Iraq war, gave an incorrect title in some copies for Donald H. Rumsfeld. He is the secretary of defense, not state.

    New Woodward Book Says Bush Ignored Urgent Warning on Iraq, NYT, 30.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/washington/29account.html?ex=1159761600&en=4455ad371b44870e&ei=5087%0A

Iraqi Police Cited in Abuses May Lose Aid

September 30, 2006
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

BAGHDAD, Sept. 29 — American officials have warned Iraqi leaders that they might have to curtail aid to the Interior Ministry police because of a United States law that prohibits the financing of foreign security forces that commit “gross violations of human rights” and are not brought to justice.

The Interior Ministry, dominated by Shiites, has long been accused by Sunni Arabs of complicity in torture and killings.

The American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, said in an interview on Friday that “at this point” Iraq had not been formally notified that its national police were in violation of the legislation, known as the Leahy Law. He said he remained optimistic that Iraqi officials would “do the right thing” and resolve the matter. Nonetheless, he said American officials had begun reviewing programs that might have to be ended.

The issue centers on one of the most sensitive subjects within the Iraqi government: the joint Iraqi-American inspection in May and subsequent investigation of a prison in eastern Baghdad known as Site 4.

Within the prison there was clear evidence of systematic abuse and torture, including victims who had “lesions resulting from torture” as well as “equipment used for this purpose,” according to a human rights report later published by the United Nations mission in Iraq.

The prison, run by an Interior Ministry national police unit, had more than 1,400 prisoners crowded into a small area. An American officer said some had been beaten or bound and hung by their arms. At least 37 teenagers or children were in the prison.

In another sign of Iraq’s security problems, the Iraqi government late on Friday banned all vehicle and pedestrian traffic in Baghdad until Sunday. No reason was given, but the decision followed news that the United States military had arrested an Iraqi employee of a leading Sunni politician on suspicion that he was helping to plan an attack inside the Green Zone. [Page A6.]

The controversy over Site 4 has become emblematic of the problem of militia members infiltrating the Interior Ministry’s security forces and fears that Iraqi leaders are unwilling to take action against rogue groups.

A number of high-ranking officials have been implicated, including one division commander, an American official said. According to United Nations officials, as many as 52 arrest warrants have been issued, though none have been carried out. And shortly after the Site 4 inspection, the government stopped allowing joint Iraqi-American prison inspections.

American officials have long warned about the dangers of militia influence, and had hoped the new government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki would crack down on the groups.

Lately, though, senior American military officials have been voicing increasing concerns about the government’s reluctance to take action against militia members. One senior American military official acknowledged last week, “There’s a political piece to this to see if they deal with these guys.”

The Leahy Law, named for its author, Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, requires that assistance to foreign military and police forces stop if the secretary of state has “credible evidence” implicating them in human rights abuses — unless effective measures are taken to bring offenders to justice. The law covers money in the foreign operations budget and Defense Department training programs.

“There is abundant evidence that Iraqi government forces are committing atrocities with impunity, yet the Pentagon has refused to even report on its procedures for monitoring U.S. aid to these forces,” Mr. Leahy said through an aide on Friday night. “Their controls on the weapons we provide have been lax to nonexistent, and so has been their adherence to the law. This avoids accountability, it taints us to be connected to these abuses, and it needs to change.”

In an interview, Mr. Khalilzad said that the Site 4 investigation was continuing and that he had discussed it several times recently with the new Iraqi interior minister, Jawad al-Bolani.

“There is a Leahy Law that affects support if the terms of the law are not observed and implemented, and he has assured us that he will do so,” Mr. Khalilzad said. “And we are still in discussions with him.” Mr. Khalilzad did not specify how long Iraqi leaders have to take action.

In the past, Western officials in Baghdad have described Mr. Bolani, a Shiite engineer, as committed to removing militia members and other offenders from the ministry. But they have also said his independence from Shiite political parties — the very thing that won him support for the job from a wide range of political parties — also meant that he had little muscle to dislodge politically connected officials.

Mr. Bolani has expressed a willingness to take action on the Site 4 abuses even without pressure from the United States, Mr. Khalilzad said, and he emphasized that American officials had not “threatened” him over the issue.

“He wants to do the right thing,” he said. “Not because of us, but because that’s what Iraqi law would require him to do as well. That’s a much better reason for him to do the right thing than for the U.S. pressing him or the U.S. threatening with some sort of a sanction.”

However, the ambassador also said American officials were examining what programs might be cut if the law were applied. “We’re looking at the potential implications of that, what will be affected, what won’t be affected,” he said.

One reason Mr. Bolani has not taken action in the Site 4 case is that he has not received written confirmation that indictments have been handed up, Mr. Khalilzad said. He said he believed that the number of Interior Ministry officials involved might be closer to a dozen than to the 52 cited by the United Nations. A senior American official said he understood that indictments had been issued.

In an interview on Friday night, Brig. Abdul Karim Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman, did not directly address whether the ministry was at risk of losing American aid. He said allegations that ministry officials were involved in torture were overblown.

But United Nations officials, who have repeatedly called attention to Site 4, warn that the failure to bring those accused of abuse to justice risks fueling sectarian violence by leading the Iraqi people to believe that militiamen and government employees are exempt from the rule of law.

“It can further the violence and counterviolence and revenge killings, because people may seek justice outside the judicial system,” said Gianni Magazzeni, chief of the United Nations human rights office in Iraq. “Any action against impunity would be a step in the right direction.”

In recent interviews, senior American military officials have said time is growing short for Iraqi leaders to take action against militias and corrupt officials, who they say are diverting money from the ministries to political parties.

In a statement on Friday, the commander of United States forces in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., distanced himself from such comments, which he said “do not reflect the close partnership” between the American military and Iraqi leaders. General Casey described Prime Minister Maliki as a “determined, courageous leader” who is “doing a good job in a tough environment.”

    Iraqi Police Cited in Abuses May Lose Aid, NYT, 30.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/world/middleeast/30iraq.html?hp&ex=1159675200&en=4778bdd74a3db34f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Iraq Terrorist Calls Scientists to Jihad

September 29, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:39 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Al-Qaida in Iraq's leader, in a chilling audiotape released Thursday, called for nuclear scientists to join his group's holy war and urged insurgents to kidnap Westerners so they could be traded for a blind Egyptian sheik who is serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison.

The fugitive terror chief said experts in the fields of ''chemistry, physics, electronics, media and all other sciences -- especially nuclear scientists and explosives experts'' should join his group's jihad, or holy war, against the West.

''We are in dire need of you,'' said the speaker, who identified himself as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir -- also known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri. ''The field of jihad can satisfy your scientific ambitions, and the large American bases (in Iraq) are good places to test your unconventional weapons, whether biological or dirty, as they call them.''

The 20-minute audio was posted to a Web site that frequently airs al-Qaida messages. The voice could not be independently identified, but it was thought to be al-Masri's. He is believed to have succeeded Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who died in a U.S. airstrike north of Baghdad in June, as head of the al-Qaida-linked organization.

Thursday's message focused attention on Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, a 68-year-old Egyptian cleric who was convicted in 1995 of seditious conspiracy for his advisory role in a plot to assassinate Egypt's president and blow up five New York City landmarks including the United Nations. Abdel-Rahman is considered the leader of Egyptian Islamic militants, and the 1993 World Trade Center conspirators were known to have attended his lectures.

''I appeal to every holy warrior in the land of Iraq to exert all efforts in this holy month so that God may enable us to capture some of the Western dogs to swap them with our sheik and get him out of his dark prison,'' said al-Masri, who is also Egyptian.

He also said more than 4,000 foreign militants have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 -- the first known statement from the insurgents about their death toll.

It was unclear why al-Masri would advertise the loss of the group's foreign fighters, but martyrdom is revered among Islamic fundamentalists, and could be used as a recruiting tool. Analysts said the announcement was likely a boast aimed at drumming up support.

''It's showing the level of dedication to their cause, the level of sacrifice jihadists are making,'' said Ben N. Venzke, director of the Washington-based IntelCenter, which monitors terrorism communications.

''In a strange kind of way, it's almost showing a sense of strength and purpose in their cause to other people around world who might be thinking about joining the fight,'' Venzke said in a telephone interview.

The statement followed the release of a U.N. report Wednesday that said fewer foreign fighters have been killed or captured in Iraq in the last few months, ''suggesting that the flow has slackened.'' The report also said some fighters had expressed dissatisfaction they were asked to kill fellow Muslims rather than Western soldiers and that the only role for them was to be suicide bombers.

Still, the report said al-Qaida ''has gained by continuing to play a central role in the fighting and in encouraging the growth of sectarian violence; and Iraq has provided many recruits and an excellent training ground.''

On the tape, al-Masri offered amnesty to Iraqis who cooperated with their country's ''occupiers,'' calling on them to ''return to your religion and nation'' during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which Sunnis began observing in Iraq on Saturday and Shiites on Monday.

''We will not attack you as long as you declare your true repentance in front of your tribe and relatives,'' he said. ''The amnesty ends by the end of this holy month.''

The audio message came on a day that saw the killings of at least 23 people and the discovery in the capital of 40 apparent victims of sectarian death squads. To stem the violence, the government announced it will soon lock down traffic access to Baghdad.

Thursday's attacks in the capital included a car bombing that killed five and wounded 34 near a restaurant in the city's center, and a suicide car bombing on a military checkpoint that killed two Iraqi soldiers and wounded 10.

One person was killed and 24 were wounded in two mortar attacks on residential areas in northern Baghdad.

The 40 bodies found all showed signs of torture, had been shot, and had their hands and feet bound, police Lt. Thayer Mahmoud said.

The violence comes amid reports from senior coalition military officials that a militia run by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has been breaking apart into freelance death squads and gangs.

Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army is one of the largest and most powerful militias in Iraq, along with the Badr Brigades -- which was once the military wing of the country's largest Shiite political group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

''There are fractures politically inside Sadr's movement, many of whom don't find him to be sufficiently radical now that he has taken a political course of action,'' a senior coalition intelligence official told reporters in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to speak publicly on intelligence issues.

The official added that ''I can think of about at least six major players who have left his organization because he has been perhaps too accommodating to the coalition.''

Last Friday, al-Sadr urged his followers not to use force against U.S. troops, saying ''I want a peaceful war against them and not to shed a drop of blood.

As part of the Baghdad security plan crackdown on sectarian militias, known as Operation Together Forward, U.S. and Iraqi troops have been going neighborhood-by-neighborhood clearing buildings.

The operation has not yet reached Sadr City, a sprawling Shiite slum of about 2 million where al-Sadr draws much of his support, but it will not be left out, the intelligence official said.

''The Baghdad security plan will cover Baghdad,'' the official said. ''I didn't say Baghdad minus; I said Baghdad.''

Government spokesman Ali al-Dabagh indicated that another part of the plan would begin soon: funneling all vehicular traffic into Baghdad through 28 checkpoints.

''The gaps between natural barriers such as Tigris river and canals will be filled with artificial barriers in order to control and observe any threats against Iraqis,'' he said. ''This thing would lead to traffic jams for people entering Baghdad, we hope that our people will understand the reasons behind this act designed to protect them.''

    Iraq Terrorist Calls Scientists to Jihad, NYT, 29.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq-Audiotape.html

Congress Is Told of Failures of Rebuilding Work in Iraq

September 29, 2006
The New York Times
By JAMES GLANZ

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — In a sweeping new assessment of reconstruction failures in Iraq, a federal inspector told Congress on Thursday that 13 of 14 major projects built by the American contractor Parsons that were examined by his agency were substandard, with construction deficiencies and other serious problems.

The final project, a prison near the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriya, was terminated for other reasons, said the inspector, Stuart Bowen, who heads the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. Delays and cost overruns led to its cancellation.

Whether because the political stakes in Iraq have risen with the approach of the November elections, or simply because of the scope of the problems, Mr. Bowen’s testimony set off outrage on both sides of the political aisle on a topic — reconstruction failures — that previously was mostly in the sights of Congressional Democrats.

“So when they get the construction right, something else goes wrong?” said Representative John M. McHugh, Republican of New York, referring to cost and schedule problems that had plagued many projects.

“Wow — thank you,” Mr. McHugh said, seemingly speechless for a moment after Mr. Bowen answered in the affirmative.

Work by two of the other largest contractors in Iraq — Bechtel and KBR, which was formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root and is a subsidiary of Halliburton — also came in for severe criticism during the lengthy hearing.

The problems with Iraq reconstruction have become notorious enough that protesters engulfed Cliff Mumm, president of the Bechtel infrastructure division, as he emerged onto the street and tried to hail a taxi after his testimony before the House Government Reform Committee.

“Eviction notice for Bechtel and its subsidiaries!” a protester shouted through a megaphone.

Democrats and Republicans on the panel posed some of the most scathing questions yet to executives from Parsons, a company that has received little but criticism in the last year for projects including prisons, border forts, clinics and hospitals.

Before his testimony, Mr. Bowen made available copies of an inspection report on one of the 13 substandard projects, a $72 million police college in Baghdad where plumbing work was so poor that the pipes burst, dumping urine and fecal matter throughout the college’s buildings. The Washington Post reported on some of those problems on Thursday.

Earnest O. Robbins II, a Parsons vice president, struggled to explain how tests could have missed such fundamental problems, in which the pipes were often not joined by proper fixtures but simply set end to end and fastened with concrete.

How could the tests “not reveal these massive, massive problems?” asked Representative Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland.

“I have some conjectures and that’s all it would be,” Mr. Robbins said, “and that is, it took a while of use for this to manifest itself, for the fittings to come loose or whatever.”

The industry witnesses also fired back at their Congressional questioners, pointing out that their work generally met with the approval of government entities that were supposed to be overseeing the work. Mr. Mumm, of Bechtel, brought a hush to the room when he listed 24 Iraqi employees on the hospital project who had been killed by local militias or insurgents, greatly slowing the work. The Iraqi site manager was murdered, the site engineer’s daughter was kidnapped and “they summarily marched out our mechanical contractor and murdered 12 of them,” Mr. Mumm said.

Democrats spent much of the day connecting the reconstruction effort, which has cost an estimated $30 billion to $45 billion in Iraqi and American financing, to the wider effort in Iraq.

“This debacle is not just a waste of taxpayers’ funds, and it doesn’t just impact the reconstruction,” Representative Henry A. Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said of one of the failed projects. “It impedes the entire effort in Iraq. This is the lens in which the Iraqis will view America.”

Representative Tom Davis, the Virginia Republican who is the committee’s chairman, began his own remarks by charging that critics of the reconstruction “oversimplify, distort and prejudge the outcome of a complex contracting process to fit the preordained conclusion that everything goes wrong in Iraq.”

But then even Mr. Davis concluded that when it came to reconstruction, “original plans were wildly optimistic,” and that only a fraction of originally planned water and electricity projects had been completed. As the hearing wore on, Mr. Davis expressed shock at statistics like the 13 of 14 projects that Mr. Bowen had found were substandard.

“What is going on here?” Mr. Davis asked. The question was never fully answered.

The 14 Parsons projects included three border forts in the north with undersize and inadequate structural beams and incomplete security measures; five health clinics around Kirkuk with crumbling concrete; and a hospital in Babil Province that also had structural problems.

    Congress Is Told of Failures of Rebuilding Work in Iraq, NYT, 29.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/world/middleeast/29contracts.html

Tape Tied to Al Qaeda Urges More Attacks in Iraq

September 28, 2006
The New York Times
By CHRISTINE HAUSER

An audiotape posted on a Web site today and attributed to the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq called for an escalation of attacks and the kidnapping of foreigners to try to force the release of a high-profile Muslim cleric imprisoned in the United States.

A man’s voice, said to be that of the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, called in the tape for fighters to come to Iraq and join a “jihad,” or holy war, during the current Muslim month of Ramadan. It was the second time that Mr. Muhajir has called in an audio message for attacks to coincide with the holy period of fasting since he was named successor to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Qaeda leader who was killed by an American airstrike in June.

“It pleases me at the end of my speech to announce the beginning of a great militaristic campaign,” said an excerpt from the tape, as translated by the SITE Institute, which tracks jihadist messages. “By it, we will eradicate the limb of the infidel and the apostate.”

If authentic, the message appears by its timing and content to be trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible that might be sympathetic to the jihadist cause.

The message refers to Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who was convicted in 1995 of plotting to blow up New York landmarks and is now in a federal medical prison in Springfield, Mo. The tape also encourages the mujahedeen “to capture some of the Roman dogs so as to secure his release from the darkness of his prison.”

Analyzing the tape, Rita Katz of SITE said Sheik Abdel Rahman was apparently mentioned because of the high motivating factor of his case as a widely known Muslim scholar who is blind and imprisoned in the United States. The cleric has been praised before by Mr. Zarqawi and had attacks in Iraq dedicated to him.

“He is a symbol,” Ms. Katz said.

The tape also fits in to a pattern of messages released by Al Qaeda, including one last year, explaining why it is important to increase attacks during Ramadan, she said. Many Muslims believe that those who die in battle during Ramadan are afforded special status in the afterlife, while militants believe this is especially true of those who die in the pursuit of jihad.

American military officials have said they believe that Abu Hamza al-Muhajir is the nom de guerre of Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian explosives expert said to have trained in 1999 at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan run by Al Qaeda.

On Sept. 7, Mr. Muhajir released an audio message urging every Sunni Arab to kill an American within 15 days, and beseeching those Sunnis whose family members have suffered under the Shiite-led government to kill a member of a Shiite party or militia.

“What you saw in the past is a drop of what you are going to see and what is prepared for you,” Mr. Muhajir said then.

    Tape Tied to Al Qaeda Urges More Attacks in Iraq, NYT, 28.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/world/middleeast/29clericcnd.html?hp&ex=1159502400&en=188eab0f25a0dc39&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Eight Die as U.S. Air Strike Destroys Iraq House

September 27, 2006
By REUTERS
Filed at 7:09 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAQUBA, Iraq (Reuters) - U.S. air strikes destroyed a house during a gun battle before dawn in a restive city north of Baghdad which killed eight people, the military said.

U.S. forces had attracted fire from a building in Baquba during a raid in pursuit of suspected al Qaeda militants, the military said in a statement.

Soldiers initially killed two men and then ordered air strikes, which killed two more men and four women, it said.

Two other men and a woman were wounded, and the U.S. forces treated them before detaining the men and taking the woman to hospital. The statement described all the men killed and wounded as terrorists.

``Coalition forces strive to mitigate risks to civilians while in pursuit of terrorists. Terrorists continue to deliberately place innocent Iraqi women and children in danger by their actions and presence,'' it said.

Relatives said the dead were a family of seven and a neighbor.

``I was inside preparing for Ramadan morning meal. I heard explosions and shooting and I ran out,'' one young, weeping woman told Reuters television as neighbors held her arms.

``When I came back I saw all my family killed. My father -- four women and three men. All of them, including my brother and his pregnant wife. They took two of our family away, a man and a woman. They were wounded,'' she said. She did not give her name.

Baquba is in Diyala province where many locals are hostile to U.S. forces and al Qaeda militants have strong influence.

Earlier reports from Iraqi police wrongly described the air strikes as a mortar attack. The U.S. military said it knew of no mortar attack in the area and neighbors interviewed by Reuters television confirmed the building was hit by air strikes.

This month is Ramadan, when Iraqis wake before dawn for a large meal and fast during the day.

    Eight Die as U.S. Air Strike Destroys Iraq House, NYT, 27.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iraq-mortars.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

House clears $70 billion mostly for Iraq war

Tue Sep 26, 2006 11:03 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday gave final approval to a massive funding bill for the Pentagon that provides another $70 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Senate was expected to pass the final version of the $447.6 billion bill by this weekend, sending it to President George W. Bush for his signature.

The House passed it 394-22 with virtually no debate as lawmakers worked to complete business before breaking to campaign for November elections that will determine control of Congress.

In a slap at Bush, the bill would bar the administration from using money from it to construct permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq or to exercise any control over Iraq's oil sector.

Both the House and Senate have approved that language before, but until this bill Republicans had stripped it in House-Senate conferences.

Democrats and many Republicans say the Iraqi insurgency has been fueled by perceptions that the United States has ambitions for a permanent presence in the country. They have called on Bush to make a policy statement that the United States has no such plans.

With this bill, Congress will have approved more than $500 billion for the wars, with the bulk of that spent in Iraq. Lawmakers called the $70 billion a "bridge fund" to last about halfway through the next fiscal year, which starts on October 1.

About $23 billion of that is to replace and refurbish equipment worn out in the harsh environments of the two conflicts.

The bill provides $377.6 billion for the Pentagon's core programs, $4.1 billion less than Bush wanted but $19 billion above current levels.

It funds a 2.2 percent military pay raise, and provide $557 million more for the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard than Bush sought.

    House clears $70 billion mostly for Iraq war, R, 26.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-09-27T030312Z_01_N26377365_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-CONGRESS.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-3

Qaeda Operative, an Escapee in ’05, Is Killed in Iraq

September 26, 2006
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

BAGHDAD, Sept. 25 — A senior operative of Al Qaeda who engineered a brazen escape from a high-security American prison in Afghanistan last year was killed Monday in a predawn raid by British soldiers in a quiet, wealthy neighborhood in southern Iraq, an American official and an official in Basra said.

About 250 soldiers wearing night-vision goggles and carrying specially equipped rifles stormed a house in the Junainah neighborhood of Basra, intending to capture the operative, whom the spokesman for the British military in Iraq identified as Omar al-Faruq, an Iraqi. They were fired upon as they entered, and shot back, killing Mr. Faruq.

The British military spokesman, Maj. Charles Burbridge, said Mr. Faruq was “a terrorist of considerable significance” who had been hiding in Basra, but declined to say whether he was the same man who had escaped from the American military detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, in July 2005. An American official in Washington and an official in Basra, neither of whom was authorized to speak publicly on the subject, said Mr. Faruq was the same man.

At the time of his arrest, in Jakarta, Indonesia, in June 2002, Mr. Faruq was described as one of the most important Qaeda figures ever captured by the United States. He told C.I.A. interrogators at Bagram that he had been sent to the region to plan large-scale attacks against American embassies and other targets in Southeast Asia.

Bush administration officials said in 2002 that he had given them information about an impending Qaeda attack in the region that year, not long before a bomb blast on the Indonesian island of Bali killed more than 180 people.

After his arrest, he was transferred to the American detention center at Bagram, 40 miles north of Kabul, where he was held by the military. Military personnel said in an interview last year that he was taken from the detention center by C.I.A. operatives. He had been sent back to Bagram by the time of his escape and was on a list of prisoners marked for transfer to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, military officials said. In a videotape released on the Internet this year, a man identified as Faruq al-Iraqi, or Faruq the Iraqi, recounted roughly the same chronology.

The escapes embarrassed the United States, and American military officials at Bagram disclosed them only belatedly. The fact that Mr. Faruq was among those who got out emerged much later — during an unrelated Army trial in November 2005 of a sergeant who had been accused of mistreating him in 2002.

Though Iraq is awash with insurgents who identify themselves as members of Al Qaeda, the most senior Qaeda leaders have rarely been Iraqi. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed this year, was a Jordanian, and Ayman al-Zawahri is an Egyptian.

But Mr. Faruq, who was born in 1969 to Iraqi parents, grew up in Kuwait, according to a Basra police official and American and British military officials. In Kuwait, he would have had better access to radical Islamic networks, because Saddam Hussein ran Iraq as a police state and did not allow radical Islam to spread.

Even so, many Iraqis who had lived for years in Kuwait were ejected by that government after Iraq invaded in 1991. Mr. Faruq’s family, it appears, was among the returnees: his mother and two brothers live in Iraq, according to a neighbor of the family in Basra, and the spokesman for the Basra police, Col. Abdul Kareem al-Zaidy.

It was not clear how Mr. Faruq came to be in Iraq. Even with his Iraqi roots, it was unusual for him to surface here. Crossing borders — even Iraq’s relatively porous ones — would have been tricky because he was so well known in intelligence circles. His choice of hiding places is even more puzzling: southern Iraq is a Shiite region where a small Sunni Arab minority is increasingly persecuted, and moving around in the area would have been difficult.

“It’s surprising for someone like him to be able to make it to Iraq, where everyone knows how he looks,” said Rita Katz, director of SITE, a Washington group that tracks Islamic militants. “The guy has long Al Qaeda records.”

According to the neighbor who lives next door to the house where Mr. Faruq was killed, who gave only his first name, Ali, Mr. Faruq entered Iraq from Kuwait about 20 days ago. He had been staying with a brother, Tariq, in the town of Zubayr, the one large Sunni enclave just south of Basra, about 20 miles from the Kuwait border, Ali said. He said he had learned of Mr. Faruq’s return from another of his brothers, Mohamed.

Mr. Faruq’s mother, who lives in Basra, had fallen ill, and Mr. Faruq arrived for a visit within the past few days, Ali said.

Major Burbridge said the British soldiers had received intelligence about where Mr. Faruq would be and when, “and acted on it very quickly.”

Colonel Zaidy, the Basra police spokesman, said by telephone from Basra on Monday night that in Iraq the man went by a different name, Mahmoud Ahmed Mohamed al-Rashid. The tribal name is common for Sunni Arabs in Basra.

Since his jailbreak in 2005, in which he and three other detainees picked the lock on their cell, changed out of their uniforms and sneaked out of the base to a getaway vehicle, Mr. Faruq appears to have been active among Islamic groups in Afghanistan. He has surfaced in references on Islamist Web sites several times, and was featured in a videotape at least once.

The videotape, released in February 2006, shows a man identified as Faruq al-Iraqi dressed in an Arab headdress and a long-sleeve, button-down white shirt with ammunition strapped to his chest and seated under a leafy tree.

Speaking animatedly and gesturing with a small stick, the man spoke of his experience in the American prison system in Afghanistan. At first, he said, he was asked routine questions and later was transferred to a center nicknamed the “prison of darkness,” because there was no light inside. He said he was abused, with cords tied tightly around his wrists and music played at excruciating volumes.

He said that interrogators accused him of destroying the World Trade Center, and that they would blast the sound of an explosion, saying it was the planes hitting the towers, and then of people screaming. He straightened up and let out a shout to imitate the sound.

More is known about Mr. Faruq’s life than about those of many other insurgent leaders, though much of the information has come from the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a senior Qaeda operative in American custody. Mr. Faruq was said to have accompanied Mr. Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s leading strategist, on a visit to Aceh, Indonesia, and, according to a C.I.A. report cited by Time magazine in 2002, was responsible for a series of bombings in Indonesia in 2000 that killed more than a dozen people.

Ali, the neighbor in Basra, said Mr. Faruq had usually worn a beard but was now clean shaven. He said his family was looking for a wife for him. He was said to have married in Indonesia before his arrest.

Colonel Zaidy said Mr. Faruq’s body had been hit with five bullets.

Versions of the raid differed. Major Burbridge said the British soldiers were able to “achieve an element of surprise” in the raid, in part because it was nighttime but also because the neighborhood was quiet and relatively peaceful. He said Mr. Faruq was alone in the house, though Ali said he saw one of Mr. Faruq’s relatives outside during the raid. The man asserted that British soldiers had put a bag over his head.

“It’s regrettable that as a result of an exchange of fire he died,” Major Burbridge said.

Ali said that he heard sounds of a scuffle and that the British soldiers shouted at someone to stop. A man’s voice answered “God is great” in Arabic.

Also on Monday, Iraqi members of Parliament began forming committees to discuss new rules that would allow for the creation of large federal regions, an extremely divisive issue here. Politicians decided recently to postpone any detailed new guideline until 2008.

At least eight people were killed in Iraq on Monday, and more than a dozen were wounded, Iraqi officials said.

The American military reported that insurgents shot an American soldier near Mosul on Monday. The soldier later died from the wounds.

Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington, and Qais Mizher from Baghdad.

    Qaeda Operative, an Escapee in ’05, Is Killed in Iraq, NYT, 26.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/world/middleeast/26iraq.html?hp&ex=1159329600&en=d98d83019abeea71&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Retired military officers criticize Rumsfeld at Democratic hearing

Updated 9/25/2006 6:34 PM ET
AP
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — Retired military officers on Monday bluntly accused Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of bungling the war in Iraq, saying U.S. troops were sent to fight without the best equipment and that critical facts were hidden from the public.

"I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the administration did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq," retired Maj. Gen. John R. S. Batiste told a forum conducted by Senate Democrats.

A second military leader, retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, assessed Rumsfeld as "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically."

"Mr. Rumsfeld and his immediate team must be replaced or we will see two more years of extraordinarily bad decision-making," Eaton added at the forum, held six weeks before the Nov. 7 midterm elections, in which the war is a central issue.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a member of the Armed Services Committee, dismissed the Democratic-sponsored event as "an election-year smoke screen aimed at obscuring the Democrats' dismal record on national security."

"Today's stunt may rile up the liberal base, but it won't kill a single terrorist or prevent a single attack," Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a statement. He called Rumsfeld an "excellent secretary of defense."

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, speaking Monday at the National Press Club, said election-season politics may be what's standing in the way of finding a solution to the insurgency in Iraq.

"My instinct is, once the election is over, there will be a lot more hard thinking about what to do about Iraq and a lot more candid observations about it," said Specter, R-Pa.

The conflict, now in its fourth year, has claimed the lives of more than 2,600 American troops and cost more than $300 billion.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., the committee chairman, told reporters last week that he hoped the hearing would shed light on the planning and conduct of the war. He said majority Republicans had failed to conduct hearings on the issue, adding, "if they won't ... we will."

Since he spoke, a government-produced National Intelligence Estimate became public that concluded the war has helped create a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Along with several members of the Senate Democratic leadership, one Republican, Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina, participated. "The American people have a right to know any time that we make a decision to send Americans to die for this country," said Jones, a conservative whose district includes Camp Lejeune Marine base.

It is unusual for retired military officers to criticize the Pentagon while military operations are underway, particularly at a public event likely to draw widespread media attention.

And Senate Republicans circulated a statement by four retired generals that said, "(W)e do not believe that it is appropriate for active duty, or retired, senior military officers to publicly criticize U.S. civilian leadership during war." The group included two three-star generals, John Crosby and Thomas McInerny, and a pair of two-star generals, Burton Moore and Paul Vallely.

But Batiste, Eaton and retired Col. Paul X. Hammes were unsparing in remarks that suggested deep anger at the way the military had been treated. All three served in Iraq, and Batiste also was senior military assistant to then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

Batiste, who commanded the Army's 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, also blamed Congress for failing to ask "the tough questions."

He said Rumsfeld at one point threatened to fire the next person who mentioned the need for a postwar plan in Iraq.

Batiste said if full consideration had been given to the requirements for war, it's likely the U.S. would have kept its focus on Afghanistan, "not fueled Islamic fundamentalism across the globe, and not created more enemies than there were insurgents."

Hammes said that not providing the best equipment was a "serious moral failure on the part of our leadership."

The United States "did not ask our soldiers to invade France in 1944 with the same armor they trained on in 1941. Why are we asking our soldiers and Marines to use the same armor we found was insufficient in 2003?" he asked.

Hammes was responsible for establishing bases for the Iraqi armed forces. He served in Iraq in 2004 and is now Marine Senior Military Fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, National Defense University.

Eaton was responsible for training the Iraqi military and later for rebuilding the Iraqi police force.

He said planning for the postwar period was "amateurish at best, incompetent a better descriptor."

Public opinion polls show widespread dissatisfaction with the way the Bush administration has conducted the war in Iraq, but division about how quickly to withdraw U.S. troops. Democrats hope to tap into the anger in November, without being damaged by Republican charges they favor a policy of "cut and run."

By coincidence, the hearing came a day after public disclosure of the National Intelligence Estimate. The report was completed in April and represented a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government, according to an intelligence official.

    Retired military officers criticize Rumsfeld at Democratic hearing, UT, 25.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-25-democrats-rumsfeld-iraq_x.htm

Families bear catastrophic war wounds

Posted 9/24/2006 11:08 PM ET
USA TODAY
By Gregg Zoroya

WASHINGTON — Army chaplain Kenneth Kaibel touched a cup of Communion wine to the lips of Spc. Ethan Biggers, who lay comatose at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. A drop slipped down his throat. The soldier gagged and coughed twice as his stepmother, Cheryl Biggers, cradled him ever more closely.

"That's all right," she whispered, her left hand gently supporting the base of his head. Depressions revealed where battlefield surgeons peeled back his scalp and removed large sections of skull to relieve swelling from a bullet fired by a sniper in Iraq in March.

His stepmother grasped his clenched fingers and kept her face close to his. "I want to make sure that he knows that I have him," Cheryl Biggers explained.

That was in June. Ethan Biggers, 22, was later transferred to a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Tampa and remains in a near-coma state.

"He can hear us. He opens his eyes. And we think he can follow our voices," says Cheryl Biggers, 51. "But he can't quite focus."

Biggers is part of a small but growing number of catastrophically wounded casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan — many of whom would never have survived this long in previous wars.

According to the Pentagon, at least 250 soldiers and Marines have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with head wounds that left them — at least initially — comatose or unable to care for themselves.

"We all look at the amputees and say, 'God, they're really lucky,' " says Liza Biggers, 25, who left her career as a freelance artist to devote all her time to her brother.

Families' lives rearranged

Families of these wrecked young men contend not only with the shock of seeing the physical destruction to their loved ones but also with how their own lives change dramatically. Parents and siblings give up careers, forsake wages and reconstruct homes to care for wounded relatives rather than consign them to a nursing home.

"My son is in such a state," says Edgar Edmundson, 51, who left his job as a pie bakery supervisor to care full time for his son, Eric, 26, an Army sergeant. "He doesn't have control of his bladder or his bowels. He can't walk and he can't talk. ... To me, his father, the life my son knew is over."

Eric Edmundson, married and the father of a 20-month-old girl, was hurt in a roadside explosion Oct. 2 in Iraq. During surgery, his heart stopped and he suffered severe brain damage. His father, who had dreams of one day opening a gun and bait shop with his only son, now bathes and changes him daily and takes him to a rehabilitation center for physical therapy. Edgar Edmundson and his wife, Beth, who works as a state office supervisor, share a three-bedroom rental home in New Bern, N.C., with their son and his family.

"I guess you could say we don't have any disposable income," Edgar Edmundson says. "I live this every day. My son and I were very close. We had big plans."

Families say they also struggle with military and VA medical systems that were unprepared for these severely brain-damaged casualties.

They say the rehabilitation of catastrophic cases has not kept pace with the advances in battlefield medicine that kept these servicemembers alive and brought them home safely.

"They're saving their lives. But there is no system really in place to give them their life back," says Marissa Behee, whose husband, Jarod, 27, was shot in the head by a sniper in Iraq on May 25, 2005.

She says her husband showed little improvement after spending three months in the summer of 2005 in one of the VA's new polytrauma centers in Palo Alto, Calif. The centers are designed specifically to treat servicemembers suffering multiple injuries.

Help for soldiers, families

VA officials defend their programs and say they have made great strides in meeting these severe needs with their polytrauma facilities. By the end of this fiscal year, 21 new outpatient centers designed to monitor and continue treating rehab patients will be operating, officials say. They concede, however, that war has brought new challenges.

"There are some issues about family support, issues about the complexity of the medical and specialized needs that have to be addressed," says Lucille "Lu" Beck, chief consultant to the VA for rehabilitative services. "We have survivors now who come to us with medical conditions, rehab needs, multiple impairments that we've not seen before."

Behee has formed a foundation called Heroes with Head Injuries to provide other families with information on how to navigate the military medical system with a brain-damaged loved one.

In an effort to address concerns about military care, the Army's Wounded Warrior Program, which serves as an advocate for severely disabled soldiers and their families, held the first in a series of symposiums with wounded soldiers and family members. In June, the Army asked the more than 40 attendees to go through dozens of complaints and narrow them to a manageable list. Among the issues raised: problems in the process of notifying families about casualties; a shortage of trained case managers; the adequacy of rehabilitation for severely brain-damaged soldiers; confusion about the medical retirement process; and the need for more financial support for families.

"They are being pushed to the highest level," says Army Col. Mary Carstensen, director of the Wounded Warrior Program.

One recommendation from the symposium was for the military to more aggressively urge soldiers to fill out living wills containing directives about whether medical treatment should be withheld in the event of a dire brain injury.

Ethan Biggers' family is divided. His twin brother, Matt, a former soldier, believes Ethan wouldn't have wanted extraordinary steps taken to preserve his life.

Army Maj. Ronald Riechers, a neurologist who treated Ethan Biggers at Walter Reed, is grim about his future. He says Biggers could either remain in a near-coma or progress to requiring significant lifelong assistance. Perhaps he would be able to sit in a wheelchair, Riechers says.

Cheryl and Liza Biggers believe they see incremental improvement in Ethan and hold out hope. Ethan Biggers' wife, Britni, hopes her husband will someday recognize the couple's son, Eben, born June 2.

Liza Biggers works with hospital staff to stimulate responses from her brother, using Britni's Cotton Blossom body lotion, peeled oranges and Tootsie Rolls.

"I feel that we're here to get Ethan better," she says. "It's not asking too much to sacrifice a year or two of our lives to get Ethan back."

They suffered a setback July 27 when Ethan's father, Rand Biggers, died in a traffic accident. He had shepherded his son through the military's medical system. "I believe in God," he had said. "Something goodwill come out of it."

Today, the Biggers family continues its vigil at Ethan's bedside.

Cheryl Biggers says that for soldiers like her stepson, their last waking thought was of war. "I want to make sure that he knows where he is, that he's safe. We wouldn't be here with him unless it was safe, and trying to convince him to wake up," she says softly, cradling Ethan.

"Come on out and join us," she tells him. "Everybody's waiting."

    Families bear catastrophic war wounds, UT, 24.9.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-09-24-families-war-wounds_x.htm

Unit Makes Do as Army Strives to Plug Gaps

September 25, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

FORT STEWART, Ga. — The pressures that the conflict in Iraq is putting on the Army are apparent amid the towering pine trees of southeast Georgia, where the Third Infantry Division is preparing for the likelihood that it will go back to Iraq for a third tour.

Col. Tom James, who commands the division’s Second Brigade, acknowledged that his unit’s equipment levels had fallen so low that it now had no tanks or other armored vehicles to use in training and that his soldiers were rated as largely untrained in attack and defense.

The rest of the division, which helped lead the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and conducted the first probes into Baghdad, is moving back to full strength after many months of being a shell of its former self.

But at a time when Pentagon officials are saying the Army is stretched so thin that it may be forced to go back on its pledge to limit National Guard deployment overseas, the division’s situation is symptomatic of how the shortages are playing out on the ground.

The enormous strains on equipment and personnel, because of longer-than-expected deployments, have left active Army units with little combat power in reserve. The Second Brigade, for example, has only half of the roughly 3,500 soldiers it is supposed to have. The unit trains on computer simulators, meant to recreate the experience of firing a tank’s main gun or driving in a convoy under attack.

“It’s a good tool before you get the equipment you need,” Colonel James said. But a few years ago, he said, having a combat brigade in a mechanized infantry division at such a low state of readiness would have been “unheard of.”

Other than the 17 brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan, only two or three combat brigades in the entire Army — perhaps 7,000 to 10,000 troops — are fully trained and sufficiently equipped to respond quickly to crises, said a senior Army general.

Most other units of the active-duty Army, which is growing to 42 brigades, are resting or being refitted at their home bases. But even that cycle, which is supposed to take two years, is being compressed to a year or less because of the need to prepare units quickly to return to Iraq.

After coming from Iraq in 2003, the Third Infantry Division was sent back in 2005. Then, within weeks of returning home last January, it was told by the Army that one of its four brigades had to be ready to go back again, this time in only 11 months. The three other brigades would have to be ready by mid-2007, Army planners said.

Yet almost all of the division’s equipment had been left in Iraq for their replacements, and thousands of its soldiers left the Army or were reassigned shortly after coming home, leaving the division largely hollow. Most senior officers were replaced in June.

In addition to preparing for Iraq, the Army assigned the division other missions it had to be ready to execute, including responding to hurricanes and other natural disasters and deploying to Korea if conflict broke out there.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, who took command in June, says officials at Army headquarters ask him every month how ready his division is to handle a crisis in Korea. The answer, General Lynch says, is that he is getting there.

Since this summer, 1,000 soldiers a month have been arriving at Fort Stewart, 400 of them just out of basic training. As a result, the First and Third Brigades are now at or near their authorized troop strength, but many of the soldiers are raw.

The two brigades started receiving tanks and other equipment to begin training in the field only in the last month, leaving the division only partly able to respond immediately if called to Korea, General Lynch said.

“I’m confident two of the four brigade combat teams would say, ‘O.K., let’s go,’ ” General Lynch said in an interview. “The Second and Fourth Brigades would say, ‘O.K., boss, but we’ve got no equipment. What are we going to use?’ So we’d have to figure out where we’re going to draw their equipment.”

Meanwhile, the division is also preparing for deployment to Iraq on an abbreviated timeline.

The brief time at home does not sit well with some soldiers. Specialist George Patterson, who re-enlisted after returning from Iraq in January, said last week that he was surprised to learn he could end up being home with his wife and daughter for only a year.

“I knew I would be going back,” Specialist Patterson said. “Did I think I would leave and go back in the same year? No. It kind of stinks.”

Instead of allowing more than a year to prepare to deploy, the First Brigade training schedule has been squeezed into only a few months, so the brigade can be ready to deploy as ordered by early December. Though the unit has not yet been formally designated for Iraq, most soldiers say there is little doubt they are headed there early next year.

Some combat-skills training not likely to be used in Iraq has been shortened substantially, said Col. John Charlton, the brigade commander. “It’s about taking all the requirements and compressing them, which is a challenge,” he said.

The timetable also leaves officers and their soldiers less time to form close relationships that can be vital, several officers said.

And soldiers have less time to learn their weapons systems. Many of the major weapons systems, like artillery and even tanks, are unlikely to be used frequently in a counterinsurgency fight like Iraq.

The division has only a few dozen fully armored Humvees for training because most of the vehicles are in use in Iraq. Nor does it have all the tanks and trucks it is supposed to have when at full strength.

“There is enough equipment, and I would almost say just enough equipment,” said Lt. Col. Sean Morrissey, the division’s logistics officer. “We’re accustomed to, ‘I need 100 trucks. Where’s my hundred trucks?’ Well, we’re nowhere near that.”

Last week, in training areas deep in the Fort Stewart woods, First Brigade soldiers were still learning to use other systems important in Iraq, like unmanned aerial vehicles, which are used for conducting surveillance.

Standing at a training airfield with three of the aircraft nearby, Sgt. Mark Melbourne, the senior noncommissioned officer for the brigade’s unmanned aerial vehicles platoon, said only 6 of the brigade’s 15 operators had qualified so far in operating the aircraft from a ground station.

All of them are supposed to be qualified by next month, but the training has been slowed by frequent rain, Sergeant Melbourne said.

This week, the First Brigade began a full-scale mission rehearsal for Iraq.

Normally, armored units preparing for Iraq are sent to Fort Irwin, Calif., for such training, but transporting a brigade’s worth of equipment and soldiers there takes a month, which the schedule would not permit.

So the trainers and Arabic-speaking role players, who will simulate conditions the unit is likely to encounter in Iraq, were brought here to conduct the three-week exercise in a Georgia pine forest, rather than in the California desert.

    Unit Makes Do as Army Strives to Plug Gaps, NYT, 25.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/us/25infantry.html?hp&ex=1159243200&en=1d384002eb8dd7e0&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Study of Iraq War and Terror Stirs Strong Political Response

September 25, 2006
The New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 — Democratic lawmakers, responding to an intelligence report that found that the Iraq war has invigorated Islamic radicalism and worsened the global terrorist threat, said the assessment by American spy agencies demonstrated that the Bush administration needed to devise a new strategy for its handling of the war.

Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that while she could not discuss details of the classified National Intelligence Estimate, “Every intelligence analyst I speak to confirms that” the Iraq war had contributed to the increased terrorist threat.

“Even capturing the remaining top Al Qaeda leadership isn’t going to prevent copycat cells, and it isn’t going to change a failed policy in Iraq,” Ms. Harman said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “This administration is trying to change the subject. I don’t think voters are going to buy that.”

In public comments on Sunday, Republican Congressional leaders did not dispute the accuracy of the reports about the intelligence estimate, although they continued to defend the American presence in Iraq.

”I think it’s obvious that the difficulties we’ve experienced in Iraq have certainly emboldened” terrorist groups, Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.”

“But I would also argue that these people didn’t need any motivation to attack us on Sept. 11,” he said.

The intelligence estimate, an assessment by America’s 16 intelligence agencies, found that the war in Iraq, rather than stemming the growth of terrorism, had helped fuel its spread across the globe.

The estimate was completed in April, and is the first formal review of global terrorism by the United States since the Iraq war began. More than a dozen government officials and terrorism experts described the estimate to The New York Times, but spoke on condition of anonymity because its contents are classified.

Several of the lawmakers who appeared on Sunday talk shows said they had not seen the classified document, whose disclosure comes weeks before the Nov. 7 elections. Intelligence reports from American spy agencies are not circulated widely on Capitol Hill, and Congressional officials said neither the House nor the Senate intelligence committees had been formally briefed on the report.

In a statement released Sunday, the White House said the characterization of the report in The New York Times “is not representative of the complete document.” The White House did not release any specifics about the report, citing the fact that it was classified.

John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence, said in a statement on Sunday that conclusions about the Iraq war are only a part of the overall intelligence assessment, and that viewing the reports conclusions “through the narrow prism of a fraction of judgments distorts the broad framework they create.”

“While there is much that remains to be done in the war on terror, we have achieved some notable successes against the global jihadist threat,” he said.

The White House also issued three pages of excerpts from recent speeches by President Bush, including remarks about the continuing threats from terrorist groups inspired by Al Qaeda.

The House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi of California, said in a statement that news reports about the intelligence estimate were “further proof that the war in Iraq is making it harder for America to fight and win the war on terror.”

Her Senate Democratic counterpart, Harry Reid of Nevada, said that “no election-year White House P.R. campaign can hide this truth — it is crystal clear that America’s security demands we change course in Iraq.”

    Study of Iraq War and Terror Stirs Strong Political Response, NYT, 25.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/world/middleeast/25terror.html?hp&ex=1159243200&en=f89b356ff46b0cb0&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat

September 24, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

Officials with knowledge of the intelligence estimate said it avoided specific judgments about the likelihood that terrorists would once again strike on United States soil. The relationship between the Iraq war and terrorism, and the question of whether the United States is safer, have been subjects of persistent debate since the war began in 2003.

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.

Analysts began working on the estimate in 2004, but it was not finalized until this year. Part of the reason was that some government officials were unhappy with the structure and focus of earlier versions of the document, according to officials involved in the discussion.

Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.

Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, said the White House “played no role in drafting or reviewing the judgments expressed in the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism.” The estimate’s judgments confirm some predictions of a National Intelligence Council report completed in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion. That report stated that the approaching war had the potential to increase support for political Islam worldwide and could increase support for some terrorist objectives.

Documents released by the White House timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks emphasized the successes that the United States had made in dismantling the top tier of Al Qaeda.

“Since the Sept. 11 attacks, America and its allies are safer, but we are not yet safe,” concludes one, a report titled “9/11 Five Years Later: Success and Challenges.” “We have done much to degrade Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to undercut the perceived legitimacy of terrorism.”

That document makes only passing mention of the impact the Iraq war has had on the global jihad movement. “The ongoing fight for freedom in Iraq has been twisted by terrorist propaganda as a rallying cry,” it states.

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies.”

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified documents, details a growing jihad movement and says, “Al Qaeda leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to attack.”

The new National Intelligence Estimate was overseen by David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, who commissioned it in 2004 after he took up his post at the National Intelligence Council. Mr. Low declined to be interviewed for this article.

The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda’s leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.

It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.

In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.

But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture about the trends in global terrorism.

In recent months, some senior American intelligence officials have offered glimpses into the estimate’s conclusions in public speeches.

“New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge,” said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a speech in San Antonio in April, the month that the new estimate was completed. “If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide,” said the general, who was then Mr. Negroponte’s top deputy and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

For more than two years, there has been tension between the Bush administration and American spy agencies over the violence in Iraq and the prospects for a stable democracy in the country. Some intelligence officials have said the White House has consistently presented a more optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq than justified by intelligence reports from the field.

Spy agencies usually produce several national intelligence estimates each year on a variety of subjects. The most controversial of these in recent years was an October 2002 document assessing Iraq’s illicit weapons programs. Several government investigations have discredited that report, and the intelligence community is overhauling how it analyzes data, largely as a result of those investigations.

The broad judgments of the new intelligence estimate are consistent with assessments of global terrorist threats by American allies and independent terrorism experts.

The panel investigating the London terrorist bombings of July 2005 reported in May that the leaders of Britain’s domestic and international intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, “emphasized to the committee the growing scale of the Islamist terrorist threat.”

More recently, the Council on Global Terrorism, an independent research group of respected terrorism experts, assigned a grade of “D+” to United States efforts over the past five years to combat Islamic extremism. The council concluded that “there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking.”

    Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat, NYT, 24.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/world/middleeast/24terror.html?hp&ex=1159156800&en=22b7a0941b08007f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Editorial

Facing Facts on Iraq

September 24, 2006
The New York Times
 

While Iraq is a central issue in this year’s election campaigns, there is very little clear talk about what to do, beyond vague recommendations for staying the course or long-term timetables for withdrawal. That is because politicians running for election want to deliver good news, and there is nothing about Iraq — including withdrawal scenarios — that is anything but ominous.

In the real Iraq, armed Shiite and Kurdish parties have divided up the eastern two-thirds of the country, leaving Sunni insurgents and American marines to fight over the rest. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and his “national unity cabinet” stretch out their arms to like-thinking allies like Iran and Hezbollah, but barely lift a finger to rein in the sectarian militias and death squads spreading terror across Baghdad and the Shiite south.

The civilian death toll is now running at roughly 100 a day, with many of the victims gruesomely tortured with power tools or acid. Over the summer, more Iraqi civilians died violent deaths each month than the number of Americans lost to terrorism on Sept. 11. Meanwhile, the electricity remains off, oil production depressed, unemployment pervasive and basic services hard to find.

Iraq is today a broken, war-torn country. Outside the relatively stable Kurdish northeast, virtually every family — Sunni or Shiite, rich or poor, powerful or powerless — must cope with fear and physical insecurity on an almost daily basis. The courts, when they function at all, are subject to political interference; street-corner justice is filling the vacuum. Religious courts are asserting their power over family life. Women’s rights are in retreat.

Growing violence, not growing democracy, is the dominant feature of Iraqi life. Every Iraqi knows this. Americans need to know it too.

Beyond the futility of simply staying the course lies the impossibility of keeping the bulk of American ground forces stationed in Iraq indefinitely. They have already been there for 42 months, longer than it took the United States to defeat Hitler. The strain is undermining the long-term strength of the Army and Marines, threatening to divert the National Guard from homeland security and emboldening Iran and North Korea. Yet with the military situation deteriorating, the Pentagon has had to give up any idea of significant withdrawals this year, or for that matter anytime in the foreseeable future.

If there is still a constructive way out of this disaster, it has to begin with some truth-telling. Politicians are not going to press for serious solutions when their constituents have not been prepared to understand what the real options are. Republicans will not talk about genuine alternatives as long as their supporters have been primed to believe victory is possible. Few Democrats will advocate anything that might wind up transferring responsibility for this awful mess to them.

Acknowledging the hard facts of today’s Iraq must be more than a political talking point for the president’s opponents. It is the only possible beginning to a serious national discussion about what kind of American policy has the best chance of retrieving whatever can still be retrieved in Iraq and minimizing the damage to wider American interests.

    Facing Facts on Iraq, NYT, 24.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/opinion/24sun1.html

Jane, We Hardly Knew Ye Died

September 24, 2006
The New York Times
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

LT. EMILY J. T. PEREZ, 23, a West Point graduate who outran many men, directed a gospel choir and read the Bible every day, was at the head of a weekly convoy as it rolled down roads pocked with bombs and bullets near Najaf. As platoon leader, she insisted on leading her troops from the front.

Two weeks ago, one of those bombs tripped her up, detonating near her Humvee in Kifl, south of Baghdad. She died Sept. 12, the 64th woman from the United States military to be killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Eight died in Vietnam.

Despite longstanding predictions that America would shudder to see its women coming home in coffins, Lieutenant Perez’s death, and those of the other women, the majority of whom died from hostile fire (the 65th died in a Baghdad car bombing a day later), have stirred no less — and no more — reaction at home than the nearly 2,900 male dead. The same can be said of the hundreds of wounded women.

There is no shortage of guesses as to why: Americans are no longer especially shocked by the idea of a woman’s violent death. Most don’t know how many women have fallen, or under what circumstances. Photographs of body bags and coffins are rarely seen. And nobody wants to kick up a fuss and risk insulting grieving families.

“The public doesn’t seem concerned they are dying,” said Charles Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University who has closely studied national service. “They would rather have someone else's daughter die than their son.”

What’s more, no one in the strained military is eager to engage in a debate about women and the risks they are taking in Iraq because, quite simply, the women are sorely needed in this modern-day insurgent conflict. As has happened many times in war, circumstances have outpaced arguments. They are sure to be taken up again at some point, only this time, the military will have real-life data on the performance of women in the field to supplant the hypotheticals.

Like most soldiers on the job, Lieutenant Perez, who will be buried at West Point on Tuesday, was focused on her mission, not on her groundbreaking role in a war that seems to have dispelled a litany of notions about women warriors.

For the first time, women by the thousands are on the ground and engaging the enemy in a war that has no front line, and little in the way of safe havens. In this 360-degree war, they are in the thick of it, hauling heavy equipment and expected to shoot and defend themselves and others from an enemy that is all around them. They are driving huge rigs down treacherous roads, frisking Iraqi women at dangerous checkpoints, handling gun turrets personnel carriers and providing cover for other soldiers.

It is not so much the job titles that have changed — the policy shift that allowed women to serve in combat support units close to the front lines occurred in 1994. Rather it is the job conditions.

“We are asking far more of our female soldiers than ever before in history,” said Elaine Donnelly, director of the Center for Military Readiness, a conservative think tank.

But a line in the Iraqi sand exists. Under the 1994 Pentagon policy, women were still barred from serving in ground combat forces — infantry, armor, field artillery — but are allowed to serve as fighter pilots and on warships. In Iraq, women were not involved in the initial invasion; they did not clear insurgents from Falluja; they don’t drive tanks or, in most cases, kick down doors in house searches.

They are also barred, technically, from “co-located units” that support combat troops. A woman can serve as a medic, for example, but not as a medic in a unit that “co-locates and remains” or accompanies a unit on the front line, like an infantry unit.

In reality, though, this so-called co-location is taking place, analysts say, although it is unclear how widespread it is. The Pentagon has stretched the language of the policy, mostly because there are not enough troops, men or women. It has done so because the language is fuzzy. An effort by some House Republican leaders last year to challenge the practice was beaten back by the Pentagon, which argued that it could not sustain the mission without women in these jobs.

“It says you can have female medics, but they can’t see combat,” said Capt. Megan O’Connor, who served in Iraq for a year and a half in the New Jersey Army National Guard as a medical operations and plans officer. “It’s all combat in Ramadi. It’s so gray. They put the rules down on paper. It looks good. It reads good. But for a commander to implement, it’s impossible.”

“The women were itching for it,” she added, and accumulating commendations and medals for bravery along the way.

Ms. Donnelly said the Pentagon was openly flouting current policy and sending women out directly with combat troops, with no debate, no hearings in Congress and, so far, no consequences. She has no qualms about women, who make up 10 percent of the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, doing the jobs they are assigned in dangerous circumstances. That is standard. But to send them out with combat troops is illegal, she said.

“I have enormous respect for these women,” said Ms. Donnelly, who opposes allowing women into ground combat forces. “My criticism is not of the women in the military. They are fulfilling their responsibility to the greatest degree, and that, too, is unprecedented. The policymakers should not be ordering them into areas that are not gender integrated.”

But the fact that the Army is successfully using women in this way is likely to lead policymakers to revisit the rule, some analysts say. “It’s that policy that when this war is over is going to have to change, even if we have to keep women out of the infantry per se,” said Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain who is the director for the women-in-the-military project at the Women’s Research and Education Institute, a nonprofit public policy group. “The next door to open is ground combat. That’s the last frontier. A lot of the social conservatives have powerful feelings about training mothers to kill.”

Conventional wisdom has long dictated that women were not suited to the battlefield — too frail, emotionally and physically, to survive combat pressure. Men, it was said, would crumble at the sight of a bloodied female soldier, or put themselves at risk to protect her. The public would not stomach women coming back in body bags or suffering life-changing wounds. And mixing men and women — with all the sexual and emotional pitfalls — would strain the unit dynamic, which can lead to deadly mistakes.

Those sorts of arguments were revived last week when the former Navy secretary James Webb, running for Senate in Virginia, was reminded of his assertions 30 years ago that women could not, and should not, fight, assertions he has distanced himself from.

None of this, so far, has come to pass. “They are pulling their own weight and performing as well as men,” Ms. Manning said. “And the American public is not any more upset about women coming home in body bags than men.”

Mady Wechsler Segal, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the associate director for the Center for Research on Military Organization, said succinctly, “If they weren’t doing a good job, we would be hearing about it.”

Certainly, women in Iraq and Afghanistan face different challenges, both at war and at home. Incidents of sexual harassment on military bases are common enough, and fending that off without offending peers and superiors is tricky. Sexual assault, while less common, only intensifies combat stress, leading to greater vulnerability. It also leads to new complications. What if your attacker is also the person you must defend, or must defend you?

A whole crop of veterans are suffering from post-traumatic stress and lost limbs, circumstances that sometimes prove more difficult for women who often fill the role of nurturers to their families.

And there are practical considerations. Women on smaller bases in Iraq often share sleeping quarters with men. Equipment in women’s sizes can sometimes be harder to come by. Some women use newer forms of birth control to make their periods less frequent. Even urinating can become a problem. The military has disbursed portable contraptions the women affectionately call a weenus, for use on long truck drives.

Women also face resistance among some male commanders, who are not keen to put women at risk, some women who have served in Iraq say. But many commanders, they added, treated them no differently.

Capt. Tammy Spicer, who commanded a transportation company for the Missouri National Guard, said women were often being watched to see if they are up to the job. Driving trucks is dangerous work in Iraq, and her company drove a million and a half miles with no enemy-related casualties.

If anything was taxing, she said, it was in 2003 in Kuwait, when she and four other women shared a tent with 45 men. The women shared showers with men, on rotation, and always got the worst hours, she said. “Their bickering, their cursing, their body noises,” she said, laughing. “They would leave their food out and we would have rats. There was no relief from men.”

    Jane, We Hardly Knew Ye Died, NYT, 24.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/weekinreview/24alvarez.html?_r=1&ref=weekinreview&oref=slogin

War price on U.S. lives equal to 9/11

Posted 9/22/2006 9:48 PM ET
AP
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) — Now the death toll is 9/11 times two. U.S. military deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan now match those of the most devastating terrorist attack in America's history, the trigger for what came next. Add casualties from chasing terrorists elsewhere in the world, and the total has passed the Sept. 11 figure.

The latest milestone for a country at war came Friday without commemoration. It came without the precision of knowing who was the 2,973rd man or woman of arms to die in conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrorist attacks killed 2,973 victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

The Pentagon's report Friday night of the latest death from Iraq, an as-yet unidentified soldier killed a day earlier after his vehicle was hit by a roadside bombing in eastern Baghdad, brought the U.S. death toll in Iraq to 2,695. Combined with 278 U.S. deaths in and around Afghanistan, the 9/11 toll was reached.

Not for the first time, war that was started to answer death has resulted in at least as much death for the country that was first attacked, quite apart from the higher numbers of enemy and civilians killed.

Historians note that this grim accounting is not how the success or failure of warfare is measured, and that the reasons for conflict are broader than what served as the spark.

The body count from World War II was far higher for Allied troops than for the crushed Axis. Americans lost more men in each of a succession of Pacific battles than the 2,390 people who died at Pearl Harbor in the attack that made the U.S. declare war on Japan. The U.S. lost 405,399 in the theaters of World War II.

Despite a death toll that pales next to that of the great wars, one casualty milestone after another has been observed and reflected upon this time, especially in Iraq.

There was the benchmark of seeing more U.S. troops die in the occupation than in the swift and successful invasion. And the benchmarks of 1,000 dead, 2,000, 2,500.

Now this.

"There's never a good war but if the war's going well and the overall mission remains powerful, these numbers are not what people are focusing on," said Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Boston University. "If this becomes the subject, then something's gone wrong."

Beyond the tribulations of the moment and the now-rampant doubts about the justification and course of the Iraq war, Zelizer said Americans have lost firsthand knowledge of the costs of war that existed keenly up to the 1960s, when people remembered two world wars and Korea, and faced Vietnam.

"A kind of numbness comes from that," he said. "We're not that country anymore — more bothered, more nervous. This isn't a country that's used to ground wars anymore."

Almost 10 times more Americans have died in Iraq than in Afghanistan, where U.S. casualties have been remarkably light by any historical standard, although climbing in recent months in the face of a resurgent Taliban.

The Pentagon reports 56 military deaths and one civilian Defense Department death in other parts of the world from Operation Enduring Freedom, the anti-terrorism war distinct from Iraq.

Altogether, 3,030 have died abroad since Sept. 11, 2001.

The civilian toll in Iraq hit record highs in the summer, with 6,599 violent deaths reported in July and August alone, the United Nations said this week.

Among the latest U.S. deaths identified by the armed forces:

•Army 2nd Lt. Emily J.T. Perez, 23, Fort Washington, Md., who died Sept. 12 in Kifl, Iraq, from an explosive device detonated near her vehicle. A former high school sprinter who sang in her West Point gospel choir, she was assigned to the 204th Support Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Hood, Texas.

•Marine Sgt. Christopher M. Zimmerman, 28, Stephenville, Texas, killed Wednesday in Anbar province, Iraq. He was assigned to 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

A new study on the war dead and where they come from suggests that the notion of "rich man's war, poor man's fight" has become a little truer over time.

Among the Americans killed in the Iraq war, 34% have come from communities reporting the lowest levels of family income. Half come from middle income communities and only 17% from the highest income level.

That's a change from World War II, when all income groups were represented about equally. In Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, the poor have made up a progressively larger share of casualties, by this analysis.

Eye-for-an-eye vengeance was not the sole motivator for what happened after the 2001 attacks any more than Pearl Harbor alone was responsible for all that followed. But Pearl Harbor caught the U.S. in the middle of mobilization, debate, rising tensions with looming enemies and a European war already in progress. Historians doubt anyone paid much attention to sad milestones once America threw itself into the fight.

In contrast, the United States had no imminent war intentions against anyone on Sept. 10, 2001. One bloody day later, it did.

    War price on U.S. lives equal to 9/11, UT, 22.9.2006,http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-22-war-toll_x.htm

U.N. Finds Baghdad Toll Far Higher Than Cited

September 21, 2006
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

BAGHDAD, Sept. 20 — A United Nations report released Wednesday says that 5,106 people in Baghdad died violent deaths during July and August, a number far higher than reports that have relied on figures from the city’s morgue.

Across the country, the report found, 3,590 civilians were killed in July — the highest monthly total on record — and 3,009 more were killed in August. There were 4,309 Iraqi civilians reported wounded in August, a 14 percent increase from July.

The report also describes evidence of torture on many of the bodies found in Baghdad, including gouged-out eyeballs and wounds from nails, power drills and acid. “Hundreds of bodies have continued to appear throughout the country bearing signs of severe torture and execution-style killing,” the report found.

As Baghdad has become the main stage for intensified sectarian fighting, the counting of the dead has become a contentious issue. Some American officials say figures released by the Baghdad morgue are inflated. The United Nations report includes the morgue’s figures of 1,855 killed in July and 1,536 killed in August. But it also counts bodies received at other hospitals in the city.

Throughout Baghdad, 2,222 people were killed in August, a 23 percent reduction from the July total of 2,884, the report found. It said the reduction “may be attributed to a degree of improved security” from recent large-scale sweeps by American and Iraqi troops through Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhoods.

But the report also said casualties had climbed in other regions, notably in Diyala and Mosul. And it said that while the number of killings decreased at the beginning of August, “further increases were evident towards the end of the month in Baghdad and other governorates.”

While most deaths occurred in Baghdad, the report suggests it may not reflect all casualties from other areas because of difficulties collecting information. Anbar Province, an insurgent haven west of the capital and one of the deadliest regions in Iraq, reported no deaths in July.

Torture remains widespread, not only by death squads but also in official detention centers, according to United Nations officials. The report said some detainees showed signs of beating “using electrical cables, wounds in different parts of their bodies, including in the head and genitals, broken bones of legs and hands, electric and cigarette burns.”

Bodies found in Baghdad, the report added, often show signs of torture that include “acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones (back, hands and legs), missing eyes, missing teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails.”

The report was released as American military officials in Baghdad described a sharp rise in executions in the capital and said that terrorists appeared to have intensified efforts to kill American soldiers.

Killings in the capital appear to have risen sharply in the past week, as close to 200 bodies have been found. An Interior Ministry official said 28 bodies were discovered Wednesday. “This past week, there was a spike in execution-style murders in Baghdad,” Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the chief American military spokesman in Iraq, said Wednesday. “Many bodies found had clear signs of being bound, tortured and executed. We believe death squads and other illegal armed groups are responsible for this type of violence.”

The increased violence around the capital also comes as many children returned to school, leaving anguished parents to decide whether to risk letting them leave the house.

According to a tally by The Associated Press, at least 65 people were killed in Iraq and more than 100 were wounded in documented attacks during the past two days, including one attack Wednesday on a tribal leader’s home in Samarra that killed 10 people and wounded 38.

The American military also reported the deaths of three more soldiers. One was killed Wednesday morning in northeastern Baghdad from small-arms fire, and two died from “noncombat incidents” in Baghdad on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

Qais Mizher contributed reporting.

    U.N. Finds Baghdad Toll Far Higher Than Cited, NYT, 21.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/21/world/middleeast/21iraq.html

Iraq Removes Chief Judge in Saddam Trial

September 19, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:59 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The chief judge in Saddam Hussein's genocide trial was replaced Tuesday amid complaints from Shiite and Kurdish officials that he was too soft on the former Iraqi leader, a move that could raise accusations of government interference in the highly sensitive case.

The government spokesman's office announced that judge Abdullah al-Amiri was removed but did not say who would take his place or why he was replaced. He was replaced on the five-member panel by Mohammed al-Uraibiy, who was his deputy in the trial, said a court source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Al-Uraibiy is a Shiite Arab, the source said.

The Arab satellite stations Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera said al-Amiri was removed after a request from Iraq's prime minister.

Hussein al-Duri, an aide to the prime minister, said one reason was al-Amiri's comments last week in a court session, in which the judge told Saddam, ''You were not a dictator.''

''The head of the court is requested to run and control the session, and he is not allowed to violate judicial regulations, '' al-Duri told Al-Arabiya television. ''It is not allowed for the judge to express his opinion.''

Al-Amiri's comment angered many Kurds and Shiites, fueling their criticism that he was too lenient with Saddam. Prosecutors had already asked for al-Amiri to be replaced after he allowed Saddam to lash out at Kurdish witnesses during a court session.

The change could revive complaints that the government is interfering in the tribunal trying Saddam and his regime members to ensure a quick guilty verdict. In the current trial, Saddam faces a possible death penalty if convicted on genocide charges over the Anfal military offensive against Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s.

In Saddam's first trial -- over alleged atrocities against Shiites in the town of Dujail -- the chief judge stepped down halfway through the nine-month-long proceedings, saying he could no longer put up with criticism from officials that he was too lenient in allowing courtroom outbursts by Saddam and his co-defendants.

He was replaced by a far tougher judge who several times threw out defendants and defense lawyers he said were out of line.

A verdict in the Dujail trial is expected on Oct. 16.

Al-Amiri presided over the latest session of trial Tuesday, in which more Kurdish survivors of Anfal recounted chemical bombardment of their villages by the Iraqi military.

One witness, Iskandar Mahmoud Abdul-Rahman, a major in the Kurdistan security force, told the court that an attack on his village began on March 20, 1988, when Iraqi aircraft appeared over the skies.

''We dropped to the floor; white smoke covered us, it smelled awful,'' Abdul-Rahman testified in Kurdish. ''My heart raced. I started to vomit. I felt dizzy. My eyes burned and I couldn't stand on my feet.''

Abdul-Rahman said he was treated at two hospitals in Iran, and lost consciousness for 10 days.

''The doctors were frequently giving me injections and medication, including eye drops. They cut the burned skin with scissors,'' he said, adding that his eyesight remains poor.

Abdul-Rahman then removed his blue shirt. There were several dark scars, each about 8 inches long, on his back.

Saddam's chief lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, and prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon approached the witness to take a close look.

Saddam and six other defendants are on trial for alleged atrocities against Kurds during Operation Anfal, a crackdown on Kurdish guerrillas in the late 1980s. The prosecution alleges some 180,000 people died in the campaign, many of them civilians killed by poison gas.

Saddam and his cousin ''Chemical'' Ali al-Majid are charged with genocide, and the others are accused of various offenses. All could face death by hanging if convicted.

Two other witnesses also testified Tuesday, repeating allegations of abuse suffered in the crackdown.

Raouf Faraj Abdullah, a 55-year-old farmer, told of poor living conditions and a shortage of food in a detention camp in the northern city of Irbil.

''The people of Irbil tossed food over the barbed wire,'' said the man, who had a thick black mustache and wore a traditional Kurdish headdress.

He said he was moved to another camp, where he was separated from his 2-year-old son and his wife, who later gave birth in her prison cell.

''When I went to see her, I found out that my newborn baby had died,'' he said.

Abdullah said 28 people were killed in attacks on his village.

A third witness, Ubeyd Mahmoud Mohammed, said 70 people, including his wife and six children, were killed by an attack on his village March 22, 1988.

Saddam, dressed in a dark suit with a white handkerchief in his chest pocket, sat silently throughout the testimony, taking notes.

But the session was marked by a heated exchange between the senior prosecutor, Jaafar al-Moussawi, and defense lawyer Badee Izzat Aref, who accused prosecutors of misleading the court by presenting a witness who allegedly had a forged passport.

He referred to an Iraqi Kurd who told the court Monday that he sought asylum in the Netherlands where he acquired Dutch citizenship in 1994.

Saddam and his lawyers argued that Iraqi law barred dual nationality, and asked that the man's testimony be stricken from the record.

Associated Press correspondents Sameer N. Yacoub reported from Baghdad and Jamal Halaby from Amman, Jordan. AP writer Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad contributed to this story. Some material also came from a pool report at the trial.

    Iraq Removes Chief Judge in Saddam Trial, NYT, 19.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Saddam-Trial.html

U.S. general sees no Iraq troop cut before mid-2007

Tue Sep 19, 2006 2:22 PM ET
Reuters
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is unlikely to begin cutting its troops in Iraq until at least mid-2007 as they try to stop sectarian violence from degenerating into civil war, a senior general said on Tuesday.

Army Gen. John Abizaid, who as head of U.S. Central Command oversees the war, said the United States might even increase the size of its force from the current 147,000, the highest since January. He also did not rule out holding in place U.S. units scheduled to leave Iraq in coming months.

His comments, the most pessimistic to date on a U.S. drawdown, come amid unabated sectarian violence in Baghdad between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims that has elevated concerns over civil war 3-1/2 years after a U.S.-led invasion.

"I think that this level will probably have to be sustained through the spring, and then we'll re-evaluate," said Abizaid, acknowledging that he thought there would have been thousands fewer U.S. troops in Iraq by now.

"I think these are prudent force levels. I think they're achieving the military effect," Abizaid told reporters.

Abizaid and Gen. George Casey, the top commander in Iraq, and others had forecast that troop levels would decline this year, while Democrats accuse the White House of mismanaging an unpopular war.

The war has become a key part of November's U.S. congressional elections, with some Democrats advocating withdrawing troops starting this year. The Bush administration has said such timetables would embolden U.S. enemies, and troops will remain as long as necessary.

U.S. troop levels have increased by 20,000 since late July. They peaked at about 160,000 late last year.

In June, when there were 127,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, U.S. commanders proposed bringing home two brigades of about 3,500 each this month and one or two more by the end of the year.

'ONE PRIORITY'

Abizaid defended the U.S. decision to shift troops out of Anbar province, heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency, into Baghdad to focus on the curbing sectarian violence.

He said the insurgency could not sink U.S. efforts in Iraq, but sectarian tensions like those boiling in Baghdad "if left unchecked could be fatal to Iraq."

Asked why not increase U.S. troops in both Anbar and Baghdad, Abizaid said that while he had "ample troops" in Iraq, that "doesn't mean you have enough troops to do everything everywhere."

"I think Baghdad is the most important place to put the military priority of effort. We military guys generally believe that you have one priority effort. And our priority effort is Baghdad, not Anbar," Abizaid said.

Abizaid said Anbar, which makes up a third of Iraq, is loaded with "very small population centers that if you concentrated your campaign efforts there would soak up a lot of troops from the decisive areas where we need them more."

Abizaid was pressed on whether the military, strained by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even had more ground troops available to go to Iraq. He said it was important the U.S. military be managed so it could address needs in Iraq and Afghanistan but also "unforeseen problems that may arise" in a place like Iran.

Abizaid said Baghdad security has gotten "slightly better" and by December "we'll have a pretty good idea whether the tactics that we've employed are right, or we're going to have to do something different."

He also emphasized the need for Iraqi political advances, including dissolution of illegal militias and police reform.

Asked if U.S. forces were winning, Abizaid said, "Given unlimited time and unlimited support, we're winning the war."

    U.S. general sees no Iraq troop cut before mid-2007, R, 19.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-09-19T182233Z_01_N19378780_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-USA-TROOPS.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C2-TopNews-newsOne-7

Iraqis Plan to Ring Baghdad With Trenches

September 16, 2006
The New York Times
By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, Sept. 15 — The Iraqi government plans to seal off Baghdad within weeks by ringing it with a series of trenches and setting up dozens of traffic checkpoints to control movement in and out of the violent city of seven million people, an Interior Ministry spokesman said Friday.

The effort is one of the most ambitious security projects this year, with cars expected to be funneled through 28 checkpoints along the main arteries snaking out from the capital. Smaller roads would be closed. The trenches would run across farmland or other open areas to prevent cars from evading checkpoints, said the ministry spokesman, Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf.

“We’re going to build a trench around Baghdad so we can control the exits and entrances so people will be searched properly,” he said in a telephone interview. “The idea is to get the cars to go through the 28 checkpoints that we set up.”

American officials said the military had approved of the plan, which has been in the works for weeks. General Khalaf said he did not know how much the construction would cost or how many laborers would be employed.

There has been a surge in the number of Iraqis killed execution-style in the last few days, with scores of bodies found across the city despite an aggressive security plan begun last month. The Baghdad morgue has reported that at least 1,535 Iraqi civilians died violently in the capital in August, a 17 percent drop from July but still much higher than virtually all other months.

American military officials have disputed the morgue’s numbers, saying military data shows that what they refer to as the murder rate dropped by 52 percent from July to August. But American officials have acknowledged that that count does not include deaths from bombings and rocket or mortar attacks.

American commanders have made securing Baghdad their top priority. They have shifted troops to Baghdad to try to contain the sectarian conflict raging in the capital, which threatens to plunge Iraq into all-out civil war. A security plan promoted in June by American officials and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki involved setting up traffic checkpoints throughout Baghdad, but failed to quell the Sunni-Shiite sectarian violence, which reached a peak in July.

Last month, the Americans and the Iraqi government began a new tactic, flooding troubled neighborhoods with thousands of troops and doing searches block by block, then leaving battalions behind to try and win the confidence of residents.

That offensive began in southern and western Baghdad and is now moving into eastern neighborhoods controlled by the Mahdi Army, a powerful militia that answers to Moktada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric.

It is unclear whether Baghdad can really be sealed off, given the city’s circumference of about 60 miles. With so much terrain, guerrillas might find areas that are unconstrained by the trenches and checkpoints. On the main roads, traffic could be snarled for miles, especially in the final days of Ramadan, when people travel to celebrate with their families.

Studies are still being conducted to determine how traffic patterns will be affected. If the outer perimeter proves effective, then perhaps some checkpoints now being operated inside the city could be taken down, easing the traffic, officials said.

President Bush said at a news conference on Friday that the Iraqis were “building a berm around the city to make it harder for people to come in with explosive devices, for example.” Military officials said the Iraqis had considered such a project earlier, but decided to go with trenches instead.

The wide cordon to be erected around the city is critical to the new security plan and will be completed within weeks, General Khalaf said. American and Iraqi officials have long said the capital is easily infiltrated because it abuts restive areas such as Anbar Province and the region to the south known as the Triangle of Death. Without a ring of security around Baghdad, insurgents and militiamen outside could return to areas cleared during sweeps, General Khalaf said.

Similar perimeters have been set up around troubled cities that are much smaller than the capital.

The most prominent example is Falluja, the insurgent stronghold in western Iraq that had 300,000 residents before a Marine-led siege in November 2004. Since then, the American military and Iraqi security forces have run the city as a mini police state, with people who want to enter required to show identification cards at checkpoints.

The American military built dirt berms with limited entry points around Samarra in the north and Rawah in the western desert.

The second-ranking American commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, stressed in an interview the importance of securing Baghdad. “I’ll be perfectly clear with you, our main effort right now is Baghdad,” he said. “It’s our focus.”

There are few quiet days in the capital.

Seven bodies were found in four different parts of Baghdad on Friday, an Interior Ministry official said. An American soldier was killed by a roadside bomb south of Baghdad, and another was killed Thursday night by a bomb northwest of Baghdad, the military said. A soldier was missing after an attack in Baghdad on Thursday in which a suicide car bomber killed two soldiers and wounded 30 others. In Anbar Province, a marine died in combat.

On the political front, a senior Shiite cleric rejected any immediate move to create autonomous regions in Iraq, further threatening a proposal by a Shiite politician to establish a legal process for partition.

The cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad al-Yacoubi, a fundamentalist Shiite, said that he believed in “maintaining the unity of the country” and that autonomous regions could not be formed without “preparing the proper conditions,” according to a statement released Thursday by his office in Najaf.

The strong stand against autonomy by Ayatollah Yacoubi further calls into question the viability of a proposal for a mechanism to carve up Iraq that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Parliament’s Shiite bloc, tried to put to the Parliament earlier this month. Mr. Hakim has long been a strong proponent of creating a nine-province autonomous region in the south that would be ruled by religious Shiites and would include the country’s main oil fields.

He called for Parliament to vote on a proposed mechanism much sooner than virtually anyone had expected.

Sunni Arabs generally oppose dividing Iraq because their provinces have little oil.

The bloc answering to Mr. Sadr, the Shiite cleric, later opposed any immediate move toward autonomy. Mr. Sadr and Mr. Hakim are bitter rivals, both struggling for dominance in the new Iraq, and both commanders of powerful militias that have skirmished several times since the American invasion.

Ayatollah Yacoubi is close to Mr. Sadr, and their united stand could be enough to block any serious consideration of autonomy for now.

Basim Sharif, an official in the ayatollah’s Fadhila Party, said the ayatollah could decide to support the legislation if it included language saying that Iraq would not break up into autonomous regions anytime soon.

Khalid W. Hassan and Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Najaf.

    Iraqis Plan to Ring Baghdad With Trenches, NYT, 16.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/16/world/middleeast/16iraq.html?hp&ex=1158465600&en=df2aba469798e11d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

U.S. Won’t Abandon Fight in Anbar, Commander Says

September 16, 2006
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 — The American military in Iraq will not abandon the fight against insurgents in Sunni-dominated Anbar Province despite a shift of troops toward Baghdad for a major operation to stifle sectarian violence in the capital, the second-ranking commander in Iraq said Friday.

The commander, Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, of the Army, describing the Baghdad security mission as “our main effort,” said he had ordered reinforcements to the capital from other parts of Iraq.

“Armies that don’t weight the main effort really don’t ever have a main effort,” General Chiarelli told Pentagon reporters via videolink from his headquarters outside Baghdad. “And that’s not the case with this force.”

Even so, General Chiarelli stressed that the American military has not forsaken Anbar Province, a Sunni area stretching from west of the capital to the Syrian border that has been a haven for homegrown insurgents and foreign terrorists.

“We are not looking to walk away from that province. That is just flat wrong,” said General Chiarelli, who is commander of day-to-day military operations in Iraq. “We are committed to the people of Al Anbar and will remain committed to the people of Al Anbar and do everything possible to make their life better.”

General Chiarelli spoke at the end of a week in which it was revealed that a classified Marine Corps intelligence report on Anbar Province said security there would continue to deteriorate absent an infusion of money and an additional division’s worth of troops.

After the report’s contents were disclosed, the senior Marine Corps commander in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Richard C. Zilmer, said his force levels “are about right” for a mission that he described as primarily training Iraqi troops to take over the security effort.

General Chiarelli said the intelligence report’s assessments of the problems in Anbar were “right on target.” But he insisted that more troops would not guarantee success.

“I don’t believe there is any military strategy alone, any kinetic operations that we can run alone, that will create the conditions for victory which we must have,” General Chiarelli said. “The real heart” of the intelligence report, he added, was “that there are economic and political conditions that have to improve out at Al Anbar, as they do everywhere in Iraq, for us to be successful.”

General Chiarelli also sought to erase any perception that a heightened emphasis on training Iraqi security forces to take over the mission from Americans meant that United States military forces had abandoned the goal of defeating the insurgency.

“We are fighting to win,” he said. “But we understand that winning is a combination of a whole bunch of things in this insurgency we’re fighting, and as I’ve indicated time and time again, this is different than any other fight I believe the United States of America has ever found itself in.”

Iraq is not in a civil war, General Chiarelli said, but the threat has shifted from terrorist and insurgent violence to battling bombings and murders driven by sectarian tensions — although at times it is difficult to separate the motivation behind any single attack, he added.

As for whether Iraq is in a civil war, he said, “I state emphatically I do not believe it is, but I do believe sectarian violence is something we’ve got to get a handle on.”

The general recounted conversations with local Iraqi officials across the country who told him the best route to lowering the level of violence is, “Find jobs for the angry young men.”

To achieve economic progress, he said, “We need help, and we’ve got commitment from the Iraqi government for help. And as quick as we can get that help out there to start working those economic conditions, I think that that is, in fact, a strategy for victory.”

    U.S. Won’t Abandon Fight in Anbar, Commander Says, NYT, 16.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/16/world/middleeast/16military.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

On Another Grim Day, Bodies Lie Everywhere in Baghdad

September 14, 2006
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

BAGHDAD, Sept. 13 — Nearly 90 Iraqis were killed or found dead here on Tuesday and Wednesday, an Interior Ministry official said, making for a particularly grim day even amid the intense sectarian violence.

At least 60 bodies were found throughout Baghdad between 6 a.m. Tuesday and 6 a.m. Wednesday, the ministry official said. Forty victims were unknown; 20 were identified.

Nearly all were shot in the head, had clear signs of torture, or were blindfolded, bound or gagged, and most were discovered in neighborhoods of western Baghdad with heavy Sunni Arab populations, he said. The other deaths reported by the ministry were in bombings and other attacks on Wednesday.

American military officials, who have been more aggressive in challenging body counts if they consider them inaccurate, disputed the number found, saying the actual number was roughly half what the ministry had reported.

According to the Baghdad morgue, whose statistics often prove to be higher than figures reported by news services or the Interior Ministry, the bodies of 1,535 victims of violent deaths, an average of 50 a day, were received in August. In July, the average was 60 a day. A recent study of civilian deaths by the United Nations found that by June, Iraqis across the country were being killed at a rate of more than 100 a day.

As the Iraqi police gathered up the bodies, several car bombs rocked Baghdad, killing or wounding dozens more. Among the attacks was a bomb that detonated shortly after 9 a.m. in southern Baghdad, killing 15 people, including 7 Iraqi police officers, and wounding 25 police officers and civilians, an American military spokeswoman said.

The Interior Ministry also said a bomb planted in an unattended car near a police station in eastern Baghdad exploded about 11:30 a.m., killing eight policemen and wounding 19 civilians.

The United States military also said two American soldiers had been killed. One died Monday from wounds sustained in fighting in Anbar Province, the largely insurgent-controlled region west of Baghdad. Another was killed Tuesday south of Baghdad when his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb.

In the capital’s heavily fortified Green Zone, a prosecutor in the genocide trial of Saddam Hussein demanded Wednesday that the judge be removed for showing bias toward the former dictator and for letting him harangue witnesses.

Mr. Hussein is on trial for his role in the so-called Anfal military campaign in 1988 against Kurdish villages in northeastern Iraq. He and his co-defendants are accused of genocide in the killing at least 50,000 Kurds, including many in chemical weapon strikes.

He was tried earlier this year in the killing of 148 men and boys in 1982 in a Shiite village, Dujail, but that verdict is not expected for another month or two.

During the court session on Tuesday, Mr. Hussein called the Kurdish witnesses who had described atrocities at the hands of Mr. Hussein’s military “agents of Iran and Zionism.” And he warned witnesses that he would “crush your heads,” according to an account by The Associated Press.

As the trial resumed Wednesday morning, a prosecutor, Munqith al-Faroon, accused the judge of letting “the defendants to go too far, with unacceptable expressions and words,” according to a pool report filed by a reporter for The Daily Telegraph of London. Mr. Faroon said the judge had allowed defendants to “treat the chamber as a political forum.”

The judge, Abdullah al-Amiri, who was a judge during Mr. Hussein’s rule, responded coolly, not raising his voice. “The judge coordinates and makes peace among the people in his presence,” he said.

The court heard a powerful and graphic account from Omer Othman Mohammed, who said he was a member of the Kurdish pesh merga militia who was caught in a chemical-weapon strike by Iraqi jets in April 1988 that left him badly burned from his chest to his legs.

“It was so fast, we were shocked,” Mr. Mohammed testified, according to The Daily Telegraph’s pool report. “The rockets did not explode, but they just broke. One hit close to me. When it broke, the chemical inside, it covered me. It was a liquid, not a gas. I was shocked. I was in pain.

“There was severe pain as if there was a high pressure on me or as if I was touching an electric current, or as if boiling water was being poured on my body. There are feelings you cannot describe to the people around you, even your loved ones.”

Mr. Mohammed said he got up after the attack and saw that pieces of the rockets had sliced through some of his comrades.

“I saw people without their heads, I saw legs and arms,” he said. “I saw parts of the body of my beloved friends. I called to a friend of mine and he came to me. I asked him for a mirror and asked him to bring me a first aid kit. I looked at my eyes and they were terribly red. I was suffering from terrible pain.”

Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi and Omar al-Neami contributed reporting.

    On Another Grim Day, Bodies Lie Everywhere in Baghdad, NYT, 14.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/world/middleeast/14iraq.html

Senator Backs the War in Iraq and Rumsfeld in a TV Debate

September 4, 2006
The New York Times
By ROBIN TONER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 — Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, one of the most endangered Republican incumbents in the Senate, defended the war in Iraq on Sunday as a war of “necessity,” not choice, arguing that it was a central part of “this broad war” against “Islamic fascism.”

In a debate on “Meet the Press” on NBC, Mr. Santorum also praised the leadership of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and President Bush. Asked if he would join calls for Mr. Rumsfeld’s resignation, Mr. Santorum said that the defense secretary had “done a fine job” and that the nation faced foes “much more potent than I think anybody ever anticipated.”

Mr. Santorum’s Democratic opponent, Bob Casey Jr., the Pennsylvania state treasurer, called him a “rubber stamp” for the Bush administration and said he had failed to hold Mr. Bush accountable for the conduct of the war.

“When you have two politicians in Washington who agree 98 percent of the time, one of them’s really not necessary,” said Mr. Casey, alluding to Mr. Santorum’s voting record. “We could have a machine have that kind of vote.”

The one-hour debate provided a stark contrast between the parties as they enter the final stretch of the midterm elections. Both candidates touched on national themes, with Mr. Casey arguing that it was time for a change toward a more “independent” senator who could “stand up to his party and his president, especially in a time of war,” and demand more accountability on national security.

For his part, Mr. Santorum reflected the renewed Republican message that the Bush administration’s aggressive policies abroad have kept Americans safe from terrorist attacks at home. “The reason we haven’t” had any terrorist attacks since Sept. 11, he argued, “is because we’ve taken it to them where they are.”

Mr. Santorum also said that Mr. Casey lacked any real plan to deal with Iraq or with the broader fight against terrorism. He repeatedly tried to tie Mr. Casey to the most liberal wing of his party on national security, which he said would undermine American intelligence and surveillance capabilities. At one point, Mr. Casey said, “Rick, Rick, you’re not debating the party, you’re debating me.”

Mr. Casey, considered a conservative on many issues, said he would not support a resolution, like the one proposed by Senator John Kerry, setting a deadline for withdrawal of American troops, nor would he vote to cut off financing for the war. “I’m not ready to abandon this mission,” he said. “We don’t need a deadline, a timeline; we need new leadership.”

More than once, Mr. Santorum accused Mr. Casey of failing to provide specifics, particularly on what programs he would cut in pursuit of a balanced budget and how he would shore up Social Security.

    Senator Backs the War in Iraq and Rumsfeld in a TV Debate, NYT, 4.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/washington/04debate.html

Iraqi Official Reports Capture of Top Insurgent Leader Linked to Shrine Bombing

September 4, 2006
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

BAGHDAD, Sept. 3 — American and Iraqi troops have captured the man who supervised the bombers of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, an act that set off a wave of brutal sectarian violence, the Iraqi national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, said Sunday.

In a statement broadcast on national television, Mr. Rubaie said the second-ranking leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, Hamid Juma Faris Jouri al-Saeedi, was captured several days ago as he hid among Iraqi families in a residential building. He said that Mr. Saeedi was operating near Baquba, north of Baghdad, in the area where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of the terrorist organization, had sought refuge before he was killed in an American airstrike three months ago.

Mr. Rubaie described Mr. Saeedi as Al Qaeda’s deputy commander in Iraq, serving beneath Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who took over the organization after Mr. Zarqawi’s death. If that characterization is true, it would suggest that Mr. Saeedi is the most senior Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia leader killed or captured since an American F-16 fighter bombed Mr. Zarqawi’s safe house on June 7.

However, a United States military official was more cautious in describing Mr. Saeedi’s place in the organization’s pecking order. While he was a “top-tier guy” who supervised those who carried out the Samarra bombing, “I’m not sure we are ready to put a number on him,” said the American official, who agreed to speak only without being named because Iraqi officials had been designated to announce the capture. “It’s a very decentralized operation.”

The news came as the United States military reported the deaths of four servicemen. Two marines were killed in attacks on Friday and Sunday in Anbar Province, the military said, and two soldiers were killed Sunday morning when a roadside bomb struck their vehicle in eastern Baghdad.

Iraqi officials have asserted that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has been severely weakened in recent months, and on Sunday Mr. Rubaie said the terror group faces a serious “leadership crisis.”

After his arrest, Mr. Saeedi gave interrogators information that has led to the arrest or killing of 20 Al Qaeda operatives, Mr. Rubaie said. He did not describe the specific roles of Iraqi and American forces in the capture of Mr. Saeedi but said it showed the proficiency of Iraqi forces “backed up by multinational forces.”

Despite the high-profile killing of Mr. Zarqawi and other operations against Al Qaeda, attacks have soared in recent months. Iraq has tipped closer to the all-out civil war that Mr. Zarqawi sought to foment when he was leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

Even the Pentagon acknowledged last week that Iraqi casualties have risen by more than 50 percent in recent months and that the Baghdad coroner’s office reported that 9 out of every 10 bodies it took in during July — more than 1,800 in total — were thought to be victims of executions.

Many of those killings have been attributed to violence between Iraq’s Shiite majority and Sunni minority. Summary executions and other sectarian killings have been common for well more than a year, but they intensified after Feb. 22 when insurgents bombed the golden-domed Askariya shrine in Samarra.

The man who Iraqi officials believe carried out that attack is Haitham al-Badri, an Iraqi native still at large. They have said that Mr. Badri and a team of insurgents entered the shrine the night of Feb. 21, tied up police guards and placed explosives around the shrine which were detonated the following morning.

Mr. Rubaie said that Mr. Saeedi, who is also known as Abu Humam and Abu Rana, was Mr. Badri’s boss.

“He is the direct supervisor of the criminal Haitham al-Badri, who planned and executed the bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra,” Mr. Rubaie said. He added that Mr. Saeedi “carried out the policy of the Al Qaeda organization in Iraq and the orders of Zarqawi to ignite sectarian riots.” His crimes included supervising kidnappers, death squads and insurgents who killed policemen and stole their pay, Mr. Rubaie added.

In Baghdad, Iraqi and American officials worked to overcome disagreements over the transfer of direct operational control of the Iraqi armed forces to the Iraqi Defense Ministry. At issue is the delineation of responsibilities between Iraqi and American forces, said an American official, who called the disputes minor.

The United States military announced that it had formally handed over the infamous Abu Ghraib prison to the Iraqi government on Friday. The prison is empty because the Americans and Iraqis transferred detainees to other centers before the handover.

Also Sunday, the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, reacted sharply to a decree from the Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani, that only the Kurdish flag and not the Iraqi should fly over government buildings in the northern Iraqi region of Kurdistan. “The current flag of Iraq is the only flag that should be hoisted on every inch of the land” until the government changes it, Mr. Maliki said.

Falah Mustafa, a senior official in the Kurdistan regional government, downplayed the dispute and said the Iraqi flag has not flown for years in the region controlled by Mr. Barzani’s party because it is identified with Saddam Hussein’s massacres. Kurdish officials, he said, would fly a new Iraqi flag once the central government changes the design.

Reporting for this article was contributed by Edward Wong, Omar al-Neami, Ali Adeeb, Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi and Khalid W. Hassan.

    Iraqi Official Reports Capture of Top Insurgent Leader Linked to Shrine Bombing, NYT, 4.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/world/middleeast/04iraq.html

Security

Troops Cut Death, but Not Fear, in a Bloody Baghdad Neighborhood

September 4, 2006
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 1 — Three weeks after American and Iraqi troops began searching, fortifying and patrolling Dora, one of Baghdad’s bloodiest neighborhoods, the odor of death on the streets has eased. After 126 bodies surfaced in Dora in July, only 18 turned up in August, according to United States military figures. Killings, most often Sunni against Shiite or vice versa in this mixed neighborhood, dropped as well: 14 were reported last month, down from 73 in July.

But in a country long on disappointment and short on hope, Dora represents only the embryo of progress. It was the first of several violent neighborhoods covered by a new Baghdad security plan — which seeks to create walled-in sanctuaries where economic development can grow in an environment of safety — and American and Iraqi officials are still struggling to make residents feel safe enough to let their children play in the streets.

The local progress is coming as death tolls across the country have been soaring, up more than 50 percent in recent months, according to the latest Pentagon assessment. And in Baghdad as a whole, the toll has been high, with the city’s morgue reporting more than 334 people killed or found dead from Aug. 24 to the end of the month.

Most of those deaths occurred in areas without a reinforced military presence. Yet the challenge for American and Iraqi officials lies in spreading security to additional trouble spots without letting Dora slide back into lawlessness. American generals admit that lasting progress will be hard to achieve.

“The difficult part is going to be holding these areas with Iraqi security forces,” the top United States commander, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., told reporters on Wednesday. “And building the relationships between the Iraqi people in the neighborhood and their security forces so they can get on with their economic development.”

American forces have frequently focused on violent areas of Iraq and then moved on — in part because they lacked enough troops to hold the territory — only to return when chaos ensued. In Tal Afar for example, a dusty agrarian city northwest of Baghdad, American troops were forced to reassert control in 2005 after a large military offensive a year earlier failed to yield a lasting peace.

In Dora, local leaders worry that violent gangs are just lying low, scouting for ways to circumvent the additional safeguards while attacking other neighborhoods or waiting for the Americans to leave.

“The calm situation right now is temporary, and if the state does not continue to build trust with the people, the situation might explode,” said Sattar al-Jabouri, 51, a Sunni sheik and member of Dora’s municipal council. “We know there are people who do not want this operation to succeed.”

Mr. Jabouri emphasized that the American presence had made Dora safer. Like others in the area, he raved about being able to sleep again on his roof, away from the sweltering indoor heat. He said some of the families who had fled the violence seemed to be returning, and that the Iraqis and Americans who searched his home were respectful and seemed sincerely interested in improving the neighborhood.

Col. Michael Beech, the American commander overseeing Dora, said the second phase of the operation, now in effect, included cutting off all but a few access points, searching every car that entered Dora, and linking American soldiers with Iraqi police officers for joint patrols. Sections of the neighborhood have been assigned to the same squads so that residents and officers can become better acquainted.

The United States military has also allotted $5 million to Dora and the surrounding area, with much of the current outlay going to Iraqis who pick up trash.

On a recent afternoon, the results were hard to miss. Piles of rancid garbage behind the market had been cleared, and workers elsewhere tossed more into trucks. Iraqi police cars and American humvees lined the streets.

Yet even as residents described the progress as encouraging, they said that life in Dora had not returned to normal. They trust neither neighbors nor the police. They still keep their children indoors. They still warn visitors to stay away.

On a block of the main shopping district on a recent morning, half the stores remained shuttered. Anmar al-Mayahi, 23, a Shiite shoe salesman who owns a store that is still closed, described Dora as a place where anxiety holds hope at arm’s length.

After two roadside bombs exploded recently in the neighborhood, on streets ringed by checkpoints, Mr. Mayahi worried that the additional security precautions were beginning to break down.

“Where did they get their weapons?” he asked. “How did they get them into the neighborhood with all the extra protection?”

“If the Americans leave, it will go back to killing in the streets,” he said. “It will be civil war.”

Mr. Mayahi said his pessimism stemmed from experience. Over the past year, several attacks at the market pushed panicked women into this store, crying for help. A few months ago, he said, two men waving pistols ran by and fired into the crowd of shoppers. The police pulled Mr. Mayahi in for questioning, and beat him after asserting, incorrectly, that he was a Sunni. He recalled their justification as being, “All Sunnis are dogs.”

He said he was thrown into a small, dank room with more than 100 people and a toilet in the center. “One guy next to me said, ‘I’ve been here for a year and a half and no one has let me leave,’ ” Mr. Mayahi said. “I started crying.”

His father, a science teacher, managed to buy his son’s freedom — paying about $250 for his release.

Most people in Dora can recite similar tales of what amounts to sectarian cleansing. Abdul Rahman Hassan, 25, a Sunni baker who lives on a street just off the main thoroughfare, said he saw his Shiite neighbors threatened a few months ago and told to leave the neighborhood.

When one man’s family did not move fast enough, “They planted a bomb in front of his house,” he said. “His son was injured, and his daughter was killed.”

Given such cases, it is no surprise that people here simply laugh when asked if they are still nervous after a few weeks of relative safety. “Of course we’re still nervous,” Mr. Hassan explained. “People are hidden, doing horrible things. We don’t see them. We just see their actions.”

Iraqi security forces — who outnumbered Americans more than six to one during the initial week of the operation — are also struggling with Dora’s uncertainties. Even with killings so far down, roadside bombs are still common in the broader Rashid district, of which Dora is a part. In August, 81 bombs were found, 56 detonated and 7 caused casualties, the United States military said. A month earlier, the numbers were similar: 89 discovered, 66 detonated and 8 that were effective.

Iraqi officials enlisted a new national police brigade several months ago to manage the area after officers were accused of taking part in kidnappings and killings. But many of the new recruits have received little or no training. And with abandoned homes being filled by both legitimate returnees and squatters, differentiating friend from foe has become the challenge.

“We have a huge problem now that we can’t know who the terrorists are and who the real neighbors are,” said Gen. Mahdi Sabeeh al-Gharawi, commander of the Second Division of the national police, which covers much of southern Baghdad. “So many people fled from their homes and other families have come in.”

For an immediate solution, he said, he started asking residents to fill out information cards so officers could verify that the people moving into the houses really owned them.

The broader hope is that the political process in Iraq will accelerate and create bonds across sects and persuade militias to disarm. General Casey and other American commanders have promised that the Baghdad security operation will last months, not weeks. They have pledged to tackle every neighborhood, including Sadr City, the stronghold of the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

The question is whether the American military has enough soldiers to expand even as it tries to sustain progress in the first neighborhoods secured.

The people of Dora say they can hardly bear the thought of being abandoned.

Reporting for this article was contributed by Khalid W. Hassan, Omar al-Neami, Ali Adeeb, Qais Mizher and Edward Wone.

    Troops Cut Death, but Not Fear, in a Bloody Baghdad Neighborhood, NYT, 4.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/04/world/middleeast/04dora.html?hp&ex=1157428800&en=6a5905586b3776ce&ei=5094&partner=homepage

News Analysis

Bush’s Shift of Tone on Iraq: The Grim Cost of Losing

September 2, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 — President Bush’s newest effort to rebuild eroding support for the war in Iraq features a distinct shift in approach: Rather than stressing the benefits of eventual victory, he and his top aides are beginning to lay out the grim consequences of failure.

It is a striking change of tone for a president who prides himself on optimism and has usually maintained that demeanor, at least in public, while his aides cast critics as defeatists.

But in his speech on Thursday in Salt Lake City — the first in a series to commemorate the Sept. 11 anniversary — he picked up on an approach that Gen. John P. Abizaid, Vice President Dick Cheney and others have refined in the past few months: a warning that defeat in Iraq will only move the battle elsewhere, threatening allies in the Middle East and eventually, Mr. Bush insisted, Americans “in the streets of our own cities.”

“We can allow the Middle East to continue on its course — on the course it was headed before September the 11th,” Mr. Bush said, “and a generation from now, our children will face a region dominated by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons. Or we can stop that from happening, by rallying the world to confront the ideology of hate and give the people of the Middle East a future of hope.”

It is reminiscent of — updated for a different war, and a different time — President Lyndon B. Johnson’s adoption of the “domino theory,” in which South Vietnam’s fall could lead to Communism’s spread through Southeast Asia and beyond. In the case of Iraq, Mr. Bush’s argument boils down to a statement he quoted from General Abizaid, his top commander in the Middle East: “If we leave, they will follow us.”

There have been elements of such themes before, of course. But Mr. Bush’s previous efforts to bolster public support for the war have focused more on the positive — on an argument, crystallized in his address at his second inaugural, that it was the mission of the United States to spread democracy and freedom.

Last Nov. 30, in the start of a series of speeches intended to quiet calls for withdrawal, Mr. Bush turned out a 32-page “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” and he argued that Iraq could eventually become a shining example of democracy’s power.

“Advancing the cause of freedom and democracy in the Middle East begins with ensuring the success of a free Iraq,” he told midshipmen at Annapolis, Md. “Freedom’s victory in that country will inspire democratic reformers from Damascus to Tehran,” he said, “and spread hope across a troubled region.”

Mr. Bush’s aides say he still fervently believes that, and they insist that the new tone is simply to make the stakes clear. Indeed, he referred in the Salt Lake City speech explicitly to the prospect of victory. But his aides, speaking on condition that their names not be used, acknowledge that the message of optimism no longer fits the moment.

“The problem with stressing the benefits of democracy is that they take a long time to mature, and it’s no sure bet that it will ever happen,” said a senior official who has participated in formation of the administration’s message since the war’s start. “The consequences of failure, though, are right in your face.”

No one has been more willing to set out the new domino theory than the administration’s chief hawk, Mr. Cheney. In private meetings with foreign visitors and members of Congress, according to several participants in those sessions, he raises the prospect that if America fails in Iraq, Saudi Arabia will be the next target and then maybe Pakistan — which, he notes, has a good-sized nuclear arsenal. No one would benefit more from an American withdrawal, he continues, than the Iranians.

For Mr. Cheney, this is a major rhetorical reversal. In the prelude to the war, he argued that ousting Saddam Hussein would usher in a new era of stability in the Middle East.

Missing from Mr. Bush’s latest speeches, at least so far, is detail about the progress of his previous plan, the “Strategy for Victory” of November, billed as the product of a review and rethinking of what had worked and what had failed.

One of its most notable features was Mr. Bush’s willingness to acknowledge past errors, from failing to anticipate the rise of the insurgency to focusing the early reconstruction effort on big infrastructure projects, which will take years to deliver benefits to the Iraqi people, if they are completed at all.

The Pentagon’s latest report to Congress about progress on that strategy painted a mixed but largely grim picture, especially about the rise of sectarian violence and the failed effort to create an effective Iraqi police force. So why not announce a new change of strategy? A senior official said this week that the president could only talk about a change of strategy so many times, without looking as if he is constantly casting about for solutions.

To some of Mr. Bush’s allies, that is a mistake. “Look, the public understands the consequences of not winning,” said David Frum, a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush and now a conservative columnist who has argued for a major widening of the American military effort in Iraq.

“What they really want to hear is a plan, and a plan that addresses the new problem, the sectarian violence,” he said in an interview. “It doesn’t help to talk about the consequences of failure unless the public thinks some measure of success is possible.”

Mr. Bush has not been specific about his thinking about what victory might require, in American and Iraqi casualties, in money and in time. The specifics may emerge in two speeches planned for next week, and another in New York, at ground zero on the fifth anniversary of the event that redefined his presidency.

For now, with a critical election looming in just 10 weeks and nervous members of his own party searching for an argument they can sell back home, he is trying to focus voters not on the high price of winning but on the harder-to-define cost of letting the dominoes fall.

    Bush’s Shift of Tone on Iraq: The Grim Cost of Losing, NYT, 2.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/world/middleeast/02prexy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Iraqi Casualties Are Up Sharply, Study Finds        NYT        2.9.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/world/middleeast/02military.html?hp&ex=
1157256000&en=798b07d4d9863014&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Security

Iraqi Casualties Are Up Sharply, Study Finds

September 2, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 — Iraqi casualties soared by more than 50 percent in recent months, the product of spiraling sectarian clashes and a Sunni-based insurgency that remains “potent and viable,” the Pentagon said in its latest comprehensive assessment of security in Iraq.

During the period from the establishment of the new Iraqi government on May 20 until Aug. 11, the average number of weekly attacks jumped to almost 800. That was a substantial increase from earlier this year and almost double the number of the first part of 2004.

As a consequence, Iraqi casualties increased 51 percent over the last reporting period. The document notes that, based on initial reports, Iraqi casualties among civilians and security forces reached nearly 120 a day, up from about 80 a day in the pervious reporting period from mid-February to mid-May. About two years ago they were running about 30 a day.

“Although the overall number of attacks increased in all categories, the proportion of those attacks directed against civilians increased substantially,” the Pentagon noted. “Death squads and terrorists are locked in mutually reinforcing cycles of sectarian strife, with Sunni and Shia extremists each portraying themselves as the defenders of their respective sectarian groups.”

The Pentagon report, titled “Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq,” is mandated by Congress and issued quarterly. It covers a broad range of subjects, including the economy, public attitudes, and security.

This time, the study is the focus of special interest because of increasing fears that Iraq is sliding into civil war and because it is being published at a time when President Bush and members of his cabinet have been trying to present a strong case in support of the war, in the face of vehement criticism from Democrats.

The report does not take account of the latest efforts to bring order to Baghdad, operations that involved 12,000 additional soldiers, including some 7,000 additional American troops. Col. Thomas Vail, the commander of a brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, told reporters on Friday that his troops had made progress in recent days in tamping down the violence in the capital. The last several days have been particularly bloody, with about 250 Iraqis killed and scores wounded since Sunday. The Pentagon acknowledged that the grim data on attacks, casualties and executions was distressing. “It’s a pretty sober report this time,” said Peter Rodman, a senior Pentagon official, who met with reporters to discuss it. “The last quarter, it’s been rough. Sectarian violence has been particularly acute and disturbing.”

Democratic lawmakers portrayed the report as evidence that the administration’s strategy was failing. “They have not provided the real resources, in terms of both military and civilian advisers, nor real dollars to reconstruct and help Iraq emerge from this period of instability,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island said.

The report chronicles dangers on an array of fronts. Although the Sunni-based insurgency has received less news media attention since the surge of sectarian violence, the report cautions that it is resilient and strong. The number of attacks in Anbar Province, a vast Sunni-dominated region in western Iraq, averages more than 30 a day.

Regarding Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia’s operations in Iraq, the report says the network’s “cellular nature” has enabled it to continue attacks despite the death of its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

But sectarian strife has emerged as the biggest worry. In recent months, the Pentagon noted, “The core conflict in Iraq changed into a struggle between Sunni and Shia extremists seeking to control key areas in Baghdad, create or protect sectarian enclaves, divert economic resources, and impose their own respective political and religious agendas.” Echoing recent statements by senior American military commanders, the report says that “conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq, especially in and around Baghdad, and concern about civil war within the Iraqi population has increased in recent months.”

The report notes that sectarian violence is gradually expanding north to Kirkuk and Diyala Province. Further, the confidence of Iraqis in the future has diminished, according to public opinion surveys cited in the Pentagon report.

Still, the study says the fighting in Iraq does not meet the “stringent international legal standards for civil war,” without further explanation. Even so, the sectarian fighting has been bloodier than ever.

In discussing daily casualty rates, the report did not distinguish between the number of dead and wounded. But it noted that execution-type killings, in particular, reached a new high in July. “The Baghdad Coroner’s Office reported 1,600 bodies arrived in June and more than 1,800 bodies in July, 90 percent of which were assessed to be the result of executions,” the report states.

The report says that progress has been made in fielding Iraqi Army units and police that can take over the main responsibility for security. It says 5 Iraqi Army divisions, 25 brigades and 85 battalions have the lead for security in their areas. It notes that a lack of noncommissioned officers and absenteeism are obstacles to fielding an effective Iraqi force. Though the 63-page report does not discuss military operations in Baghdad in detail, it has become clear in recent months that Iraq could not be effectively secured without the active involvement of the Americans. When the Americans cut back patrols in Baghdad, violence rose and American commanders decided to send additional troops to the capital from elsewhere in the country.

The report notes that Iraq’s Interior Ministry does not have a system to determine how many of the forces trained by police advisers are still on the job. Advisers from the American-led forces estimate that the attrition rate is about 20 percent a year.

Citing polling data from the International Republican Institute, the report states that almost 80 percent of Iraqis thought in April 2006 that the general situation would be better in a year. By June, it was less than 50 percent. “In general, Iraqis have had an optimistic outlook,” the report stated. “However, as time has passed, their optimism has eroded.”

    Iraqi Casualties Are Up Sharply, Study Finds, NYT, 2.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/world/middleeast/02military.html?hp&ex=1157256000&en=798b07d4d9863014&ei=5094&partner=homepage