"You Call Donald Rumsfeld and Tell Him Our Sorry Asses Are Ready to Go Home"
by Steve
By and large, I have stayed away from doing daily updates on how bad things are going in Iraq for our troops. But the recent spate of attacks by Iraqis against our occupying forces and our counterattacks to deal with remaining hostile forces begs for more attention. For several weeks right after the “victory”, it seemed our media turned away from daily coverage of the difficulties and followed the White House script that we were done and victory was achieved. But as it became clear that brave men were dying in alarming numbers from a populace that was supposed to be welcoming us as liberators, the media to their credit returned to covering the occupation with some energy.
What the media is finding are troops doing a job long after the alleged Commander in Chief said the war was over, and long after they thought they were supposed to go home, in conditions that are understandably affecting morale and their sanity. And the media is finding that we are making mistakes, killing innocent Iraqis, and as a result turning the populace that was supposed to greet us with open arms as liberators into grieving and loathing captives in their own land.
It was not supposed to end this way for the brigade's 5,000 soldiers and officers, who were accompanied by a reporter during the war and again this month in Baghdad. After fighting their way from the Kuwaiti border to Saddam International Airport in three fierce weeks, they believed that the war — or at least their part of it — was over.
Six months after arriving in Kuwait and almost three months after entering Iraq, they were ready to go home. Then they discovered that, at least from a soldier's-eye view on the ground, there seemed to be no American plan for a postwar Iraq.
The mayhem that followed the collapse of Mr. Hussein's government on April 9 has thrust them into a new mission: keeping peace, even as their weary minds and bodies are still at war.
"You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home," Pfc. Matthew C. O'Dell, an infantryman in Sergeant Betancourt's platoon, said as he stood guard on Tuesday. "Tell him to come spend a night in our building."
On guard at checkpoints and hospitals, Sergeant Betancourt has found himself alarmed even by the approach of a child.
Two months after surging into Baghdad, the First Brigade's soldiers and officers have found themselves enmeshed in yet another war — less intense, perhaps, but still exhausting, still perilous and, at times, still psychologically taxing.
Some are haunted by the deaths they caused — and suffered — and have sought counseling. All are tired and hot and increasingly bitter. Morale has plummeted as sharply as the temperature has risen.
Last Saturday night, Sergeant Betancourt's company sent a Humvee and an armored personnel carrier on a mission to fix the satellite phone their company had bought in Baghdad. As they were returning, someone threw a grenade from an overpass. It exploded only a few feet away, rattling but not seriously injuring two soldiers.
"If it had been a split second earlier, it'd have been bad," Staff Sgt. Ray B. Robinson, a squad leader in Sergeant Betancourt's company, said."They're killing us."
He added later, "Enough is enough."
And it is not surprising that the soldiers on the front lines know what is riding on this: George Bush’s ass.
The mission remains as important as the battles that preceded it, for if some order is not brought to Iraq, and the economy restored to a functioning state, the war these men fought so hard to win may seem to have been in vane.
Colonel Grimsley puts it in a larger, political context, understanding the importance of success in Iraq for President Bush and his re-election campaign next year.
"They have invested everything in this," he said.
For the soldiers, this is little solace.
And the new mission is causing the deaths of innocent Iraqis, which appears to be a time bomb waiting to go off.
What appeared significant was that the muscular military campaign to uproot, arrest or kill the remnants of guerrilla fighters loyal to Saddam Hussein, who remains unaccounted for, has caused civilian casualties and is inflaming sentiments among the Iraqis.
In this patch of mud-brick homes 36 miles north of Baghdad, nearly everyone was asleep Thursday night when the explosion and gunfire erupted on the main road a quarter mile away. A group of Hussein loyalists had fired a rocket-propelled grenade at an M1-A1 tank in a convoy of vehicles from the Seventh Armored Cavalry squadron. The soldiers returned fire and killed two Iraqis on the spot, military officials said. No Americans were hurt.
The next thing the villagers heard was an Iraqi voice that cried out from the dirt road that winds into the village, "The Americans are coming! Get out of your houses!"
In the heat of the night, only the moon illuminated the shorn wheat fields as men, women and children ran for the cluster of sheep and cows bedded down among the thistles, villagers said. Some of the villagers laid among the animals for cover, but some kept running.
Then came the rumble of the diesel engine armored personnel carrier and the clatter of its machine gun, they said. In a flash of tracer bullets and screams, the armored vehicle did its work, spraying the field, setting the brown wheat stubble on fire, and then roaring away.
Not all of the villagers got up. A 70-year-old farmer, three of his sons and a grandson died in the assault on the village. This morning, according to the villagers' account, military officials drove into the village and apologized for the attack.
"They said it was a mistake," said Rassaq Ali Jassim, 40, whose father and three brothers died. "They said it was dark and there had been an attack on the road. They apologized."
In Balad today, when a reporter tried to ask a soldier for information about the operations in the area, an officer called out, ordering him not to speak. The men of Al Hir this evening were putting up the frames for the funeral tents. Across the pasture, four dead sheep killed by the gunfire lay bloated in the animal pen near the cinderblock hut where Ali Jassim al-Khazraji, the patriarch of the village, died on the pallet where he was sleeping near the flock. His grandson, Qassim Zubar, 19, was running to reach his grandfather when he was killed. A concrete aqueduct near where he fell was pocked by machine gun fire. Hamza Ali Jassim, Abd Ali Jassim and Amir Ali Jassim died where they fell in the field. Their head wounds were so severe that two of them had to be identified by an appendectomy scar and a missing finger.
At dawn, an American armored vehicle came and took the bodies, the residents said. The soldiers searched the houses for weapons, but found none, they added. By midmorning, the soldiers returned with the bodies, which were washed and sent to the holy city of Najaf, where most Shiites bury their dead. An officer delivered the apology, the residents said.
This evening, while the men worked, the women gathered in a circle in the dirt courtyard, weeping and lamenting their losses. All the residents of the village are from the al-Khazraji clan, a prominent Shiite Muslim tribe that was sympathetic to the American and British effort to topple Mr. Hussein.
Noufa Hamoud, 60, whose eyes reddened with tears, said that before the attack on the village, her attitude had been, "Long live Bush, Long live Bush." She was an aunt of the three brothers, and her weathered face bore the small tattoos of rural Iraq.
Now, she said of Mr. Bush: "I will not forgive him. They were so young, they had children, they had never committed any crime. He has leveled our family."
But then the Iraqis don’t vote next year, do they?
More and more evidence emerges daily that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were terribly wrong when they attacked General Shinseki for suggesting that a force of several hundred thousand troops would be necessary to occupy and provide security.
Yet while the use of massive force -- 4,000 soldiers participated in one operation this week alone -- might achieve military goals, it risks alienating many Iraqis upon whose support the U.S. reconstruction of the country depends.
U.S. commanders contend that the surge in recent attacks against Americans in Iraq does not represent a full-scale guerrilla war fed by discontent over the occupation. Yet the military's aggressive actions signal a new determination to snuff out, as quickly as possible, attacks that are jeopardizing the U.S. reconstruction and could, in time, erode American political support for the war as well.
The "hot spots" of resistance are largely confined to the so-called Sunni Triangle within 100 miles of Baghdad that is populated by the Sunni Muslims who were most loyal to Hussein. In fact, a pro-U.S. politician, Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi, has alleged that Hussein could be hiding in the area.
Even so, the attacks suggest that U.S. leaders misjudged how many troops the job would require, and the enthusiasm with which Iraqis would greet American forces.
Bush administration officials wanted to keep the U.S. troop numbers as small as possible in the postwar period, believing that with a small "footprint," the American presence would seem less like an oppressive military occupation.
Yet "if we had troops all over this area, maybe we wouldn't have needed the operations this week," said Daniel Goure, a former defense official and vice president of the Lexington Institute, a Virginia research organization.
He said the continuing increase in the number of U.S. troops in the country -- now approaching 200,000 -- is an acknowledgment of this.
Well, at this rate, at least the Iraqis can look forward to their status as our 51st State, as James Fallows predicted in the Atlantic Monthly a while back, with the plusses and minuses that entails.
What I find interesting in the renewed and relatively intensive media coverage of our difficulties in Iraq is the unspoken message in providing the coverage: the media has found a covert way to get back at the oppressive Bush White House and slowly begin the undermining of their credibility. I may be too optimistic here, but I think the “Top Gun” stunt and declaration that the war was over turned out to be so over-the-top for many that even the cowed members of the media have had enough.
