29 September 2004

Prewar Assessment on Iraq Saw Chance of Strong Divisions

Douglas Jehl and David E. Sanger
New York Times

28 September 2004


Correction Appended

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 - The same intelligence unit that produced a gloomy report in July about the prospect of growing
instability in Iraq warned the Bush administration about the potential costly consequences of an American-led invasion two
months before the war began, government officials said Monday.

The estimate came in two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council, an
independent group that advises the director of central intelligence. The assessments predicted that an American-led invasion of
Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.

One of the reports also warned of a possible insurgency against the new Iraqi government or American-led forces, saying that
rogue elements from Saddam Hussein's government could work with existing terrorist groups or act independently to wage
guerrilla warfare, the officials said. The assessments also said a war would increase sympathy across the Islamic world for some
terrorist objectives, at least in the short run, the officials said.

The contents of the two assessments had not been previously disclosed. They were described by the officials after two weeks in
which the White House had tried to minimize the council's latest report, which was prepared this summer and read by senior
officials early this month.

Last week, Mr. Bush dismissed the latest intelligence reports, saying its authors were "just guessing'' about the future, though he
corrected himself later, calling it an "estimate.''

The assessments, meant to address the regional implications and internal challenges that Iraq would face after Mr. Hussein's
ouster, said it was unlikely that Iraq would split apart after an American invasion, the officials said. But they said there was a
significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent internal conflict with one another unless an occupying force
prevented them from doing so.

Senior White House officials, including Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, have contended that some of the early
predictions provided to the White House by outside experts of what could go wrong in Iraq, including secular strife, have not
come to pass. But President Bush has acknowledged a "miscalculation'' about the virulency of the insurgency that would rise
against the American occupation, though he insisted that it was simply an outgrowth of the speed of the initial military victory in
2003.

The officials outlined the reports after the columnist Robert Novak, in a column published Monday in The Washington Post,
wrote that a senior intelligence official had said at a West Coast gathering last week that the White House had disregarded
warnings from intelligence agencies that a war in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility in the Muslim world. Mr. Novak
identified the official as Paul R. Pillar, the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, and criticized him for
making remarks that Mr. Novak said were critical of the administration.

The National Intelligence Council is an independent group, made up of outside academics and long-time intelligence
professionals. The C.I.A. describes it as the intelligence community's "center for midterm and long-term strategic thinking.'' Its
main task is to produce National Intelligence Estimates, the most formal reports outlining the consensus of intelligence agencies.
But it also produces less formal assessments, like the ones about Iraq it presented in January 2003.

One of the intelligence documents described the building of democracy in Iraq as a long, difficult and potentially turbulent
process with potential for backsliding into authoritarianism, Iraq's traditional political model, the officials said.

The assessments were described by three government officials who have seen or been briefed on the documents. The officials
spoke on condition that neither they nor their agencies be identified. None of the officials are affiliated in any way with the
campaigns of Mr. Bush or Senator John Kerry. The officials, who were interviewed separately, declined to quote directly from
the documents, but said they were speaking out to present an accurate picture of the prewar warnings.

The officials' descriptions portray assessments that are gloomier than the predictions by some administration officials, most
notably those of Vice President Dick Cheney. But in general, the warnings about anti-American sentiment and instability appear
to have been upheld by events, and their disclosure could prove politically damaging to the White House, which has already had
to contend with the disclosure that the National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the council in July presented a far darker
prognosis for Iraq through the end of 2005 than Mr. Bush has done in his statements.

The reports issued by the intelligence council are of two basic types: those that try to assess intelligence data, like the October
2002 document that assessed the state of Iraq's unconventional weapons programs, and broader predictions about foreign
political developments.

The group's National Intelligence Estimate about Iraqi weapons has now been widely discredited for wildly overestimating the
country's capabilities. Members of the intelligence council have complained that they were pressured to write the document too
quickly and that important qualifiers were buried.

The group's recent National Intelligence Estimate, prepared in July this year, with its gloomy picture of Iraq's future, was
described by White House officials in the past two weeks as an academic document that contained little evidence and little that
was new.

"It was finished in July, and not circulated by the intelligence community until the end of August,'' said one senior administration
official. "That's not exactly what you do with an urgent document.''

Mr. Pillar, who has held his post since October 2000, is highly regarded within the C.I.A. But he has been a polarizing figure
within the administration, particularly within the Defense Department, where senior civilians who were among the most vigorous
champions of a war in Iraq derided him as being too dismissive of the threat posed by Mr. Hussein.

A C.I.A. spokesman said Monday that Mr. Pillar was not available for comment and that his comments at the West Coast
session had been made on the condition that he not be identified. An intelligence official said Mr. Pillar had supervised the
drafting of the document, but the official emphasized that it reflected the views of 15 intelligence agencies, including the Defense
Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the State Department's bureau of Intelligence and Research.

A spokesman for the National Security Council, Sean McCormack, said Monday that "we don't comment on intelligence and
classified reports," and he would not say whether Mr. Bush had read the January 2003 reports. But he said "the president was
fully aware of all the challenges prior to making the decision to go to war, and we addressed these challenges in our policies."

"And we also addressed these challenges in public," he added.

A senior administration official likened Mr. Bush's decision to a patient's decision to have risky surgery, even if doctors warn that
there could be serious side effects. "We couldn't live with the status quo," the official said, "because as a result of the status quo
in the Middle East, we were dying, and we saw the evidence of that on Sept. 11."

Officials who have read the July 2004 National Intelligence Estimate have said that even as a best-case situation, it predicted a
period of tenuous stability for Iraq between now and the end of 2005. The worst of three cases cited in the document was that
developments could lead to civil war, the officials have said. Some Democratic senators have asked that the document be
declassified, but administration officials have called that prospect unlikely.

The White House has also sought to minimize the significance of the estimate, with Mr. Bush saying that intelligence agencies had
laid out "several scenarios that said, life could be lousy, life could be O.K. or life could be better, and they were just guessing as
to what the conditions might be like.'' Mr. Bush later corrected himself, saying that he should have used the word estimate.

Democrats have contrasted the dark tone of the intelligence report with the more upbeat descriptions of Iraq's prospects offered
by the administration. The White House has defended its approach, saying that it is the job of intelligence analysts to identify
challenges, and the job of policy makers to overcome them. But administration officials have also emphasized that the White
House was not given a copy of the document until Aug. 31, only about two weeks before it was made public by The New York
Times.

In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell acknowledged that "we have seen an increase in
anti-Americanism in the Muslim world'' since the war began. Mr. Powell also said the insurgency in Iraq was "getting worse'' as
forces opposed to the United States and the new Iraqi leadership remained "determined to disrupt the election'' set for January.

Correction: Sept. 29, 2004, Wednesday

A front-page article yesterday about prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq misidentified the television program on
which Secretary of State Colin L. Powell discussed them on Sunday. It was ABC's ''This Week," not ''Fox News
Sunday," on which he appeared the same day.

-------------------------------------------
Citation:
Douglas Jehl and David E. Sanger, "Prewar Assessment on Iraq Saw Chance of Strong Divisions", New York Times, 28 September 2004.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/politics/28intel.html?pagewanted=print&position=

27 September 2004

Afghanistan I: Back to Warlords and Opium

J. Alexander Thier
New York Times

24 September 2004

On Tuesday, President George W. Bush told the UN General Assembly that "the Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom." Yet in nearly three years the United States has failed to create security, stability, prosperity or the rule of law in Afghanistan.

These failings are not just a reflection of the great difficulties of nation-building. They are also the direct result of the Bush administration's policy decisions. The efforts in Afghanistan are underfinanced and undermanned.

The root of the problem is that we invaded Afghanistan to destroy something - the Taliban and Al Qaeda - but we didn't think much about what would grow in its place. While we focus on fighting the terrorists (and even there our effectiveness has been questionable), Afghanistan has become a collection of warlord-run fiefs fueled by a
multibillion-dollar opium economy.

We armed and financed warlords with records of drug-running and human rights abuses stretching back two decades. These decisions were made with disregard for the long-term implications for the mission there.

The U.S. Army continues to hunt insurgents in the mountains, but Washington has refused to take the steps necessary to secure the rest of the country, and it shows. More coalition and Afghan government soldiers and aid workers have died this year than in each of the previous two.

The opium trade is also out of control, fueling lawlessness and financing terrorists. Last year, opium brought in $2.3 billion; this year, opium production is expected to increase by 50 to 100 percent.

Amid terrorist attacks and fighting among regional warlords, the country is preparing for presidential elections on Oct. 9. A recent UN report warned that warlords were intimidating voters and candidates. This month, the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, which has monitored post-conflict elections in trouble spots like Bosnia and Kosovo, declared that Afghanistan was too dangerous for its election monitors (it is sending a small "election support team" instead).

President Hamid Karzai narrowly escaped assassination last week on his first campaign trip outside Kabul. Eight other candidates have called for elections to be delayed, saying it's too dangerous for them to campaign.

Many of these problems stem from early mistakes. Rather than moving quickly to establish security and then gradually turning over control to a legitimate domestic authority, we have done the opposite. As fighting among warlord militias in the countryside intensifies, we are slowly expanding our presence and being dragged into conflicts.

In Kabul, the effort to build a stable, capable government has also lagged dangerously. Karzai has begun to show great fortitude in challenging warlords. But his factious cabinet, born of political compromise, has collapsed under the pressure of the country's hurried presidential elections.

Outside Kabul, Karzai's control remains tenuous in some places, nonexistent in others. Kabul's Supreme Court, the only other branch of government, is controlled by Islamic fundamentalists.

It's true that there have been several important accomplishments. The Taliban and Al Qaeda no longer sit in Kabul's presidential palace; girls are back in school in many parts of the country; some roads and buildings have been rebuilt, and more than 10 million Afghans have registered to vote in the presidential elections. Thousands of international aid workers are working with the Afghans, often at great risk. Despite the slow progress, most Afghans are more hopeful about their future than they have been in years.

But many people working there feel that much more could have been done both to help Afghanistan and fight terrorism over the last three years. Unless the next administration steps up to the plate, we may soon be asking, "Who lost Afghanistan?"

J. Alexander Thier, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, was a legal adviser to Afghanistan's constitutional and judicial reform commissions.

-----------------------------------------
Citation:

J. Alexander Thier, "Afghanistan I: Back to Warlords and Opium," New York Time/International Herald Tribune, 24 September 2004.
Original URL: http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=540233.html

US troops stop honouring Iraq 'no-go' deals

Steve Negus
Financial Times

24 September 2004

US forces signalled this week that they had stopped honouring locally negotiated truces between Iraq's interim government and insurgent groups in an attempt to extend coalition control into previously designated "no-go" areas.



This sparked heavy fighting yesterday between US forces and rebels in two Iraqi guerrilla strongholds, the Sunni town of Samarra and the Shia slum of Sadr City.



In Samarra, Iraqi insurgents launched the first concerted ambush on US forces since the Americans began patrolling the city on September 9, said Major Neal O'Brien, public affairs officer for the First Infantry Division.



No US troops were hurt and at least 14 insurgents were reported killed.



US tanks meanwhile guarded the streets of Sadr City after seizing an enclave in the south of the sprawling suburb on Tuesday. Hospitals reported at least 20 people killed in the fighting, the worst in Sadr City for two weeks. The area, east of Baghdad, is controlled by militia loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The incursion came after the collapse of talks between representatives of Mr Sadr and Iraq's interim government on a deal by which the militia would disarm.



In both Samarra and Sadr City, US and Iraqi officials accused insurgents of breaching the ceasefire deals first - in Samarra by attacks on US forces, in Sadr City by hoarding weapons.



The US military has never officially recognised truces negotiated by the interim government of Iyad Allawi, the prime minister, though they honoured them in practice until Tuesday.



Mr Allawi has several times declared his willingness to negotiate with insurgents. His representatives have talked to Mr Sadr's militia and Samarra groups and the Consultative Council of the Mujahideen of Falluja, a town west of Baghdad that is considered the toughest of the "no-go" zones to crack.



Last week, however, US military officials said they meant to force their way into Falluja and other rebel-held zones in time for elections scheduled for January, as soon as enough trained Iraqi troops were available.

-----------------------------------
Citation:

Steve Negus, "US Troops stop honouring Iraq 'no-go' deals, Financial Times, 24 September 2004.

More Iraqi Civilians Killed By U.S. Forces Than By Insurgents, Data Shows

Nancy Yousseff
Knight-Ridder Newspapers

25 September 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis - most of them civilians - as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder.


According to the ministry, the interim Iraqi government recorded 3,487 Iraqi deaths in 15 of the country's 18 provinces from April 5 - when the ministry began compiling the data - until Sept. 19. Of those, 328 were women and children. Another 13,726 Iraqis were injured, the ministry said.


While most of the dead are believed to be civilians, the data include an unknown number of police and Iraqi national guardsmen. Many Iraqi deaths, especially of insurgents, are never reported, so the actual number of Iraqis killed in fighting could be significantly higher.


During the same period, 432 American soldiers were killed.


Iraqi officials said the statistics proved that U.S. airstrikes intended for insurgents also were killing large numbers of innocent civilians. Some say these casualties are undermining popular acceptance of the American-backed interim government.


That suggests that more aggressive U.S. military operations, which the Bush administration has said are being planned to clear the way for nationwide elections scheduled for January, could backfire and strengthen the insurgency.


American military officials said "damage will happen" in their effort to wrest control of some areas from insurgents. They blamed the insurgents for embedding themselves in communities, saying that's endangering innocent people.


Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, an American military spokesman, said the insurgents were living in residential areas, sometimes in homes filled with munitions.


"As long as they continue to do that, they are putting the residents at risk," Boylan said. "We will go after them."


Boylan said the military conducted intelligence to determine whether a home housed insurgents before striking it. While damage would happen, the airstrikes were "extremely precise," he said. And he said that any attacks by the multinational forces were "in coordination with the interim government."


The Health Ministry statistics indicate that more children have been killed around Ramadi and Fallujah than in Baghdad, though those cities together have only one-fifth of the Iraqi capital's population.


According to the statistics, 59 children were killed in Anbar province - a hotbed of the Sunni Muslim insurgency that includes the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah - compared with 56 children in Baghdad. The ministry defines children as anyone younger than 12.


"When there are military clashes, we see innocent people die," said Dr. Walid Hamed, a member of the operations section of the Health Ministry, which compiles the statistics.


Juan Cole, a history professor at University of Michigan who specializes in Shiite Islam, said the widespread casualties meant that coalition forces already had lost the political campaign: "I think they lost the hearts and minds a long time ago."


"And they are trying to keep U.S. military casualties to a minimum in the run-up to the U.S. elections" by using airstrikes instead of ground forces, he said.


American military officials say they're targeting only terrorists and are aggressively working to spare innocent people nearby.


Nearly a third of the Iraqi dead - 1,122 - were killed in August, according to the statistics. May was the second deadliest month, with 749 Iraqis killed, and 319 were killed in June, the least violent month. Most of those killed lived in Baghdad; the ministry found that 1,068 had died in the capital.


Many Iraqis said they thought the numbers showed that the multinational forces disregarded their lives.


"The Americans do not care about the Iraqis. They don't care if they get killed, because they don't care about the citizens," said Abu Mohammed, 50, who was a major general in Saddam Hussein's army in Baghdad. "The Americans keep criticizing Saddam for the mass graves. How many graves are the Americans making in Iraq?"


At his fruit stand in southern Baghdad, Raid Ibraham, 24, theorized: "The Americans keep attacking the cities not to keep the security situation stable, but so they can stay in Iraq and control the oil."


Others blame the multinational forces for allowing security to disintegrate, inviting terrorists from everywhere and threatening the lives of everyday Iraqis.


"Anyone who hates America has come here to fight: Saddam's supporters, people who don't have jobs, other Arab fighters. All these people are on our streets," said Hamed, the ministry official. "But everyone is afraid of the Americans, not the fighters. And they should be."


Iraqi officials said about two-thirds of the Iraqi deaths were caused by multinational forces and police; the remaining third died from insurgent attacks. The ministry began separating attacks by multinational and police forces and insurgents June 10.


From that date until Sept. 10, 1,295 Iraqis were killed in clashes with multinational forces and police versus 516 killed in terrorist operations, the ministry said. The ministry defined terrorist operations as explosive devices in residential areas, car bombs or assassinations.


The ministry said it didn't have any statistics for the three provinces in the north: Arbil, Dohuk and Sulaimaniyah, ethnic Kurdish areas that generally have been more peaceful than the rest of the country.


The Health Ministry is the only organization that attempts to track deaths through government agencies. The U.S. military said it kept estimates, but it refused to release them. Ahmed al Rawi, the communications director of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Baghdad, said the organization didn't have the staffing to compile such information.




The Health Ministry reports to interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, whom the United States appointed in June.


Iraqi health and hospital officials agreed that the statistics captured only part of the death toll.


To compile the data, the Health Ministry calls the directors general of the 15 provinces and asks how many deaths related to the war were reported at hospitals. The tracking of such information has become decentralized since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime because both hospitals and morgues issue death certificates now. And families often bury their dead without telling any government agencies or are treated at facilities that don't report to the government.


The ministry is convinced that nearly all of those reported dead are civilians, not insurgents. Most often, a family member wouldn't report it if his or her relative died fighting for rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia or another insurgent force, and the relative would be buried immediately, said Dr. Shihab Ahmed Jassim, another member of the ministry's operations section.


"People who participate in the conflict don't come to the hospital. Their families are afraid they will be punished," said Dr. Yasin Mustaf, the assistant manager of al Kimdi Hospital near Baghdad's poor Sadr City neighborhood. "Usually, the innocent people come to the hospital. That is what the numbers show."


The numbers also exclude those whose bodies were too mutilated to be recovered at car bombings or other attacks, the ministry said.


Ministry officials said they didn't know how big the undercount was. "We have nothing to do with politics," Jassim said.


Other independent organizations have estimated that 7,000 to 12,000 Iraqis have been killed since May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations.


Iraqis are aware of the casualties that are due to U.S. forces, and nearly everyone has a story to tell.


At al Kimdi Hospital, Dr. Mumtaz Jaber, a vascular surgeon, said that three months ago, his 3-year-old nephew, his sister and his brother-in-law were driving in Baghdad at about 9 p.m. when they saw an American checkpoint. His nephew was killed.


"They didn't stop fast enough. The Americans shot them immediately," Jaber said. "This is how so many die."


At the Baghdad morgue, Dr. Quasis Hassan Salem said he saw a family of eight brought in: three women, three men and two children. They were sleeping on their roof last month because it was hot inside. A military helicopter shot at them and killed them: "I don't know why."


U.S. officials said any allegations that soldiers had recklessly killed Iraqi citizens were investigated at the Iraqi Assistance Center in downtown Baghdad.


"There is no way to refute" such stories, said Robert Callahan, a spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. "All you can do is tell them the truth and hope it eventually will get through."


---


(Knight Ridder special correspondent Omar Jassim contributed to this report.)


----------------------------------------

Citation:

Nancy Yousseff, "More Iraqi Civilians Killed By U.S. Forces Than By Insurgents, Data Shows," Knight-Ridder, 25 September 2004.
Original URL: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6962.htm

24 September 2004

The Hollow Army

by James Fallows Mar 01 '04 The Atlantic Monthly

The United States spends more on armed forces than do all other countries combined; the resulting arsenal is more than a match for any opposing power and for nearly any conceivable coalition of foes. No one disputes that American military supremacy is an international reality. But our military has become vulnerable in a way that is obvious to everyone associated with it yet rarely acknowledged by politicians and probably not appreciated by much of the public. The military's people, its equipment, its supplies and spare parts, its logistics systems, and all its other assets are under pressure they cannot sustain. Everything has been operating on an emergency basis for more than two years, with no end to the emergency in sight.

The situation was serious before the invasion of Iraq; now it is acute. A dozen years ago, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States was freed from the threat that had driven its military planning throughout the preceding decades. In the 1990s scores of bases were closed, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were demobilized. When the first President Bush launched the Gulf War against Iraq, two million Americans were on active military duty. When the second President Bush launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, the active-duty "end strength," or head count, was only 1.4 million.

Total military spending also fell, though much less dramatically, at the end of the first Bush Administration and during Bill Clinton's first term. During Clinton's second term America's foreign military obligations began to expand, mainly through the commitment in the Balkans, but also with missions in Latin America and Central Asia. As George W. Bush took office, the Army's leadership was already complaining that a smaller force could not indefinitely play a larger role. In the late 1990s Army units were being mobilized for "contingency deployments" fifteen times as frequently as a decade before.

Obviously, everything changed after 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's a slight exaggeration to say that the entire U.S. military is either in Iraq, returning from Iraq, or getting ready to go. But only slight. The basic problem is that an ever leaner, numerically smaller military is being asked to patrol an ever larger part of the world. "Unanticipated U.S. ground force requirements in postwar Iraq," a report for the Army War College noted late last year, "have stressed the U.S. Army to the breaking point," with more than a third of the Army's total "end strength" committed in and around Iraq. "Operation Iraqi Freedom and its aftermath argue strongly," the report said, "for an across-the-board reassessment"—that is, for an increase of U.S. force levels.

Meanwhile, barely noticed, the United States still has some 75,000 soldiers in Germany, 41,000 in Japan, 41,000 in Korea, 13,000 in Italy, 12,000 in the United Kingdom, and so on, down through a list of more than a hundred countries—plus some 26,000 sailors and Marines deployed afloat. The new jobs keep coming, and the old ones don't go away. Several times I have heard officers on Army bases refer mordantly to the current recruiting slogan: "An Army of One." The usual punch line is, "That's how many soldiers are left for new assignments now."

Three things are wrong with the current situation. The most immediate and obvious is what it does to the troops. In the flush of patriotism after 9/11, those in uniform were asked to make extraordinary sacrifices, and they did. For much of the time since then the Army has imposed "stop loss" policies, which prevent members of the military from retiring or resigning, and amount to a form of forced labor for those who have already chosen to serve. Members of the Reserves and the National Guard, many of whom signed up with the understanding that they would be "weekend warriors," have been mobilized for one-year stints since 9/11. Just before Thanksgiving, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that another 15,000 Reserve and Guard members would be called up this spring for as much as a year's service in Iraq, in addition to some 43,000 already mobilized. This year nearly 40 percent of the U.S. presence in Iraq will be from the Guard and the Reserves. The family and business disruptions caused by these unexpected mobilizations are incalculable. Some reservists and active-duty soldiers no doubt thrive on unexpected assignments. But for the military as a whole, the stepped-up "ops tempo," or pace of operations, is hard to sustain with a volunteer force. Since the elimination of the draft, in 1973, the military has had to compete with the rest of the U.S. economy for manpower. It has done so in material ways, by increasing pay and benefits, and with its traditional appeal to those seeking challenge, service, and personal growth. But it has also offered volunteers a certain amount of control over their destiny, because they could always resign if they chose. And although recruiters would never put it this way, the enlistees of the 1990s could reasonably assume that the greatest physical danger they would face would come during training exercises, not from roadside bombs in a place like Baghdad or Fallujah. Guard and Reserve members could, within certain limits, assume that their lives would remain normal.

Last fall, two years into the emergency, numerous indicators suggested that Americans were beginning to vote with their feet. Guard units across the country fell short of their recruiting targets, and the Army Reserves reported a shortfall in re-enlistments. An un-scientific poll of U.S. troops in Iraq conducted by the military newspaper Stars and Stripes in October found that nearly half planned not to re-enlist. "We are expending the force and doing little to ensure its viability in the years to come, years we have been assured it will take to win the war on terrorism," retired Army General Frederick Kroesen wrote in a military journal on hearing that reservists would be mobilized for a second year. "It might be prudent now to ask the managers who decreed the current second-year Reservists' extensions what they plan for the third year." An overworked military can function very well for a while, as ours has—but not indefinitely if it relies on volunteers. "We are in serious danger of breaking the human-capital equation of the Army," Thomas White, a retired general and a former Secretary of the Army, told me last year. "Once you break it, it takes a long time to put it back together. It took us over twenty years after Vietnam."

The second problem is that America has so many troops tied down in so many places that, for all its power, it is strangely hamstrung. Despite our level of spending and our apparent status as the world's mono-power, the United States has few unused reserves of military strength. Sending troops in a hurry to the Korean DMZ—or to Iran, or the Taiwan Strait—would mean removing them in a hurry from some other place where, according to U.S. policy, they are also needed. The military press has been abuzz with the news that four divisions, representing nearly half the Army's active-duty strength, are now officially in the two lowest readiness categories, because of their service in Iraq. These divisions—the well-known 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, 1st Armored, and 4th Infantry—will spend six months this year repairing machines, restocking supplies, and resting soldiers before returning to fully ready status. During the 2000 presidential campaign George W. Bush said, "The next President will inherit a military in decline"—in part because under the Clinton Administration two Army divisions were classified as unready because of their service in the Balkans.

In a pinch all these units could of course fight and win. But throughout America's era as a world power, governments under both parties have wanted the country to seem overprepared—extra-formidable—so that our adversaries will know the United States has the means to do almost anything it chooses. Now America is over-extended. The limits on U.S. power are more apparent than they were before we committed troops in Iraq.

The third problem involves national strategy. Our stated ambitions are wholly out of sync with the resources America can bring to bear. Even now, despite solemn promises, we do not have enough soldiers to occupy and democratize Iraq while also fulfilling previous commitments in many other places around the globe. Soon even fewer U.S. troops will be available to enter any other necessary engagement. As its currency sinks and its alliances fray, the United States relies more on "hard" military power for its influence than on the variety of cultural, intellectual, diplomatic, and technological assets that the political scientist Joseph Nye, of Harvard, has called "soft power."

Yet even as the reach of U.S. hard power expands, the country avoids both the financial and the human costs of maintaining a military establishment. Roughly one American in 200 is on active military duty—the lowest proportion in a century. While increasing America's worldwide obligations, the Bush Administration has been reluctant either to shore up traditional soft-power assets, especially alliances, or to take the steps necessary for maintaining hard power. In particular the Administration is dead set against increasing the military's end strength. This is partly because it would be expensive: each soldier adds $50,000 to $100,000 to the annual Pentagon budget. But mostly it is because Rumsfeld believes so strongly and argues so forcefully, inside and outside the Administration, that the military must become smaller, as part of a "transformation" to a radically leaner and more agile force, before anyone can think about making it larger again. Rumsfeld's determination to reform the military is his most admirable trait. But as he showed by insisting on a disastrously small force for Operation Iraqi Freedom, when gripped by theory Rumsfeld can be blind to practical realities. The military—particularly the Army—is hidebound and inefficient. But right now, for the jobs it has been assigned, it is also too small.

Logically speaking, it's easy to see a solution to the military's problems. But politically, it's hard, because the solution necessarily involves one or more of the following: The United States can cut back on its promises and commitments. Or it can spend significantly more money to attract enough soldiers to a volunteer force. Or it can find ways other than voluntary enlistment to bring them in. Some advantages and disadvantages of each approach are obvious; others will emerge only with debate. But the next President will have to take some or all of these steps. Let's hear from the candidates about what the plan will be.

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic . Copyright © 2004 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.

10 September 2004

Between 10,000 and 30,000 Iraqis Killed Since US Invasion

Bassem Mroue
Associated Press

September 8, 2004


BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) At Sheik Omar Clinic, a big book records 10,363 violent deaths in Baghdad and nearby towns since the war began last year deaths caused by car bombs, clashes between Iraqis and coalition forces, mortar attacks, revenge killings and robberies.



While America mourns the deaths of more than 1,000 of its sons and daughters in the Iraq campaign, the U.S. toll is far less than the Iraqi. No official, reliable figures exist for the whole country, but private estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000 killed since the United States invaded in March 2003.



The violent deaths recorded in the leather ledger at the Sheik Omar Clinic come from only one of Iraq's 18 provinces and do not cover people who died in such flashpoint cities as Najaf, Karbala, Fallujah, Tikrit and Ramadi.



Iraqi dead include not only insurgents, police and soldiers but also civilian men, women and children caught in crossfire, blown apart by explosives or shot by mistake both by fellow Iraqis or by American soldiers and their multinational allies. And they include the victims of crime that has surged in the instability that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime.



Adding to the complexity of sorting out what has happened, the records that have been kept don't always say whether a death came in a combat situation or from some other cause.



The prospect of violent death is the latest burden for a people who suffered through decades of war and a brutal dictatorship under Saddam, whose regime has been accused by human rights groups of killing as many as 300,000 Iraqis it deemed enemies.



''During Saddam's days killings were silent. Now the killing is done openly and loudly,'' said Ghali Karim Hassan, who lost his 31-year-old son, Ghaidan, last April.



He said Ghaidan was killed in Najaf when a demonstration called by radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr led to a gunbattle with coalition troops, mainly Spaniards and Salvadorans. Ghaidan, who left a wife and three children, was one of 22 protesters killed.



In a country where the dead are often buried quickly without proper accounting by authorities, the real number of Iraqis whose lives were cut short in the Iraq conflict may never be known.



U.S. officials said they didn't have the resources to track civilian deaths during the U.S.-led occupation, which ended officially June 28. Iraq's central authorities also haven't reported comprehensive figures on civilian deaths while record-keeping was meticulous under Saddam, the interim government didn't even begin trying to keep track until five months ago.



In a guerrilla war without front lines, where teenagers confront tanks with rocket-propelled grenades, establishing who was an innocent civilian and who was a legitimate combatant makes the process of compiling detailed figures on civilian deaths problematic.

''It is difficult to establish the right number of casualties,'' said a spokeswoman for Amnesty International, Nicole Choueiry. Her London-based human rights organization estimates more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians died in the first year of the conflict alone.



However, Amnesty's figure was based in part on media reports that often simply repeated claims of American and Iraqi officials. Iraq is as large as California and much of the country is too dangerous for independent teams to investigate more than a handful of death claims.



Iraq Body Count, a private group that bases its figures in part on reports by 40 media outlets, puts the number of civilian deaths since the conflict began at between 11,793 and 13,802.



Hazem al-Radini at the Human Rights Organization in Iraq said his group estimates the toll at more than 30,000 civilian deaths. He said the group didn't have any statistics and based the figure on reports by Iraqi news media.



Iraqi authorities have begun trying to determine overall death figures, though they face formidable problems. Insurgent groups are either reluctant to report death figures for security reasons or inflate them to win public sympathy. And some Iraqi families bury their dead quickly, without reporting them.



The Iraqi Health Ministry began tabulating civilian deaths in April, when heavy fighting broke out in Fallujah and Najaf. The ministry's figures indicate 2,956 civilians, including 125 children, died across the country ''as the result of a military act'' between April 5 and Aug. 31. Of those, 829 were in Baghdad, the ministry figures say.



In some cases, it is uncertain whether individuals were killed by insurgents or soldiers or were killed by criminals or rivals who used the turmoil of war as a cover for settling scores. And even in cases where the cause was known, records sometimes don't specify.



However, Iraqis argue, even those killed by criminals could be considered indirect victims of a war that destroyed Iraq's security services and brought a spike in crime.



''Our work here multiplied by at least 10 times compared to prewar periods,'' said Dr. Abdul-Razzak Abdul-Amir, head of the Baghdad coroner's office.



Al-Radini at the Human Rights Organization in Iraq agreed. ''The main responsibility behind these Iraqi civilians deaths lies with the occupation because those victims would not have fallen had there not be an occupation,'' he said.