Iraqis Grapple with Confusing Election Choices

Lin Noueihed
Reuters
30 December 2004

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Mohammed Slaibi was planning to vote in Iraq's first post-Saddam Hussein election until attackers burned down the local election office. Now the driver thinks it is too dangerous even to register for the Jan. 30 poll. Anyway, he wouldn't know who to vote for or how to do it. "To be honest I am scared, because there is nothing to guarantee you will make it home from voting alive," he said. "Anyway, I don't know who any of the people running are. You have to know who you are voting for or what is the point?"

With only a month to go until what Iraq's interim government says will be the country's first free election, even Iraqis who are willing to brave the threat of bombs and bullets to cast a ballot have little idea what that really means. A poll commissioned by the International Republican Institute, a U.S.-funded body that promotes democracy, found that while over two-thirds of Iraqis strongly intend to vote, some 41 percent think they will be electing a new president. Less than a third of those polled between Nov. 24 and Dec. 5 understood that they would be electing a 275-seat National Assembly and only a third knew its task would be to draft a constitution that would pave the way to a permanent government.

One college-educated Iraqi said he was determined to vote and would take his family's ballots to the box on election day, not realizing votes must only be cast in person and in secret. Another Iraqi thought the election was going to take place over two weeks, saying he would wait a few days before casting his ballot to see which polling stations were safe from attack. "Iraqis have no previous electoral awareness as Iraq only had cosmetic elections under Saddam," said Farid Ayar, spokesman for Iraq's Electoral Commission, which is organizing the poll. "The Commission has only existed for six months and it is difficult, in that time, to make people fully aware. But we are doing a lot; Iraqis are now aware that there will be elections."


SHI'ITE CAMPAIGN

Slick television and newspaper advertisements encourage Iraqis not to miss their historic opportunity to vote. On election day, voters will get one large, folded ballot sheet with a mind-boggling choice of 111 candidate lists, each identified by its title, number and logo. The names of the candidates will not be included, to the likely confusion of people who generally identify with senior political or religious figures heading or backing the slates.

But the biggest challenge is to ensure that Iraqis of all ethnicities and religious groups show up on election day. "How can you elect people if you know nothing about their background, if they are noble people from good families who have served Iraq?" said Wissam Khaled, a Sunni doorman in Baghdad. "The only ones that we hear about are those that spent their whole lives in Iran not Iraq. On election day, I bet people are just going to mark their sheet at random. No one knows."

On the streets of Baghdad, there is little evidence that almost 7,500 candidates will be competing in the poll. The only campaign posters to be seen carry the image of Iraq's most revered Shi'ite Muslim cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has given his blessing to the United Iraqi Alliance, a joint Shi'ite list likely to dominate the poll. Sistani has issued an edict demanding Iraqis vote. Shi'ites, oppressed for decades, are keen to take part in a poll likely to cement their increased power since last year's U.S.-led war.

Kurds, who elected an assembly in their northern enclave in 1992, have more experience with democracy than most Iraqis. Most of them are expected to vote for a coalition that brings together Iraq's top two Kurdish parties, the PUK and KDP. But many Sunnis, dominant before the war but marginalized since the overthrow of Saddam, say they have little to vote for.

Iraq's main Sunni party pulled out of the running, saying persistent bloodshed in the Sunni north and west would deter voters who were ill-prepared for the landmark poll anyway. "If you visit Mosul it would never occur to you that this city will see its first free election next month," said a local journalist in the mainly Sunni Arab northern city, who declined to give his name. "We have no prominent candidates who are known in our community. Anyway people are too scared to vote."

Citation: Lin Noueihed, "Iraqis Grapple with Confusing Election Choices," Reuters, 30 December 2004.

A Flood of Troubled Soldiers Is in the Offing, Experts Predict

Scott Shane
New York Times
16 December 2004


WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - The nation's hard-pressed health care system for veterans is facing a potential deluge of tens of thousands of soldiers returning from Iraq with serious mental health problems brought on by the stress and carnage of war, veterans' advocates and military doctors say.

An Army study shows that about one in six soldiers in Iraq report symptoms of major depression, serious anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, a proportion that some experts believe could eventually climb to one in three, the rate ultimately found in Vietnam veterans. Because about one million American troops have served so far in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Pentagon figures, some experts predict that the number eventually requiring mental health treatment could exceed 100,000.

"There's a train coming that's packed with people who are going to need help for the next 35 years," said Stephen L. Robinson, a 20-year Army veteran who is now the executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, an advocacy group. Mr. Robinson wrote a report in September on the psychological toll of the war for the Center for American Progress, a Washington research group.

"I have a very strong sense that the mental health consequences are going to be the medical story of this war," said Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, who served as the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs from 1994 to 1997.

What was planned as a short and decisive intervention in Iraq has become a grueling counterinsurgency that has put American troops into sustained close-quarters combat on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War. Psychiatrists say the kind of fighting seen in the recent retaking of Falluja - spooky urban settings with unlimited hiding places; the impossibility of telling Iraqi friend from Iraqi foe; the knowledge that every stretch of road may conceal an explosive device - is tailored to produce the adrenaline-gone-haywire reactions that leave lasting emotional scars.

And in no recent conflict have so many soldiers faced such uncertainty about how long they will be deployed. Veterans say the repeated extensions of duty in Iraq are emotionally battering, even for the most stoical of warriors.

Military and Department of Veterans Affairs officials say most military personnel will survive the war without serious mental issues and note that the one million troops include many who have not participated in ground combat, including sailors on ships. By comparison with troops in Vietnam, the officials said, soldiers in Iraq get far more mental health support and are likely to return to a more understanding public.

But the duration and intensity of the war have doctors at veterans hospitals across the country worried about the coming caseload.

"We're seeing an increasing number of guys with classic post-traumatic stress symptoms," said Dr. Evan Kanter, a psychiatrist at the Puget Sound veterans hospital in Seattle. "We're all anxiously waiting for a flood that we expect is coming. And I feel stretched right now."

A September report by the Government Accountability Office found that officials at six of seven Veterans Affairs medical facilities surveyed said they "may not be able to meet" increased demand for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Officers who served in Iraq say the unrelenting tension of the counterinsurgency will produce that demand.

"In the urban terrain, the enemy is everywhere, across the street, in that window, up that alley," said Paul Rieckhoff, who served as a platoon leader with the Florida Army National Guard for 10 months, going on hundreds of combat patrols around Baghdad. "It's a fishbowl. You never feel safe. You never relax."

In his platoon of 38 people, 8 were divorced while in Iraq or since they returned in February, Mr. Rieckhoff said. One man in his 120-person company killed himself after coming home.

"Too many guys are drinking," said Mr. Rieckhoff, who started the group Operation Truth to support the troops. "A lot have a hard time finding a job. I think the system is vastly under-prepared for the flood of mental health problems."

Capt. Tim Wilson, an Army chaplain serving outside Mosul, said he counseled 8 to 10 soldiers a week for combat stress. Captain Wilson said he was impressed with the resilience of his 700-strong battalion but added that fierce battles have produced turbulent emotions.

"There are usually two things they are dealing with," said Captain Wilson, a Southern Baptist from South Carolina. "Either being shot at and not wanting to get shot at again, or after shooting someone, asking, 'Did I commit murder?' or 'Is God going to forgive me?' or 'How am I going to be when I get home?' "

When all goes as it should, the life-saving medical services available to combat units like Captain Wilson's may actually swell the ranks of psychological casualties. Of wounded soldiers who are alive when medics arrive, 98 percent now survive, said Dr. Michael E. Kilpatrick, the Pentagon's deputy director of deployment health support. But they must come to terms not only with emotional scars but the literal scars of amputated limbs and disfiguring injuries.

Through the end of September, the Army had evacuated 885 troops from Iraq for psychiatric reasons, including some who had threatened or tried suicide. But those are only the most extreme cases. Often, the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder do not emerge until months after discharge.

"During the war, they don't have the leisure to focus on how they're feeling," said Sonja Batten, a psychologist at the Baltimore veterans hospital. "It's when they get back and find that their relationships are suffering and they can't hold down a job that they realize they have a problem."

Robert E. Brown was proud to be in the first wave of Marines invading Iraq last year. But Mr. Brown has also found himself in the first ranks of returning soldiers to be unhinged by what they experienced.

He served for six months as a Marine chaplain's assistant, counseling wounded soldiers, organizing makeshift memorial services and filling in on raids. He knew he was in trouble by the time he was on a ship home, when the sound of a hatch slamming would send him diving to the floor.

After he came home, he began drinking heavily and saw his marriage fall apart, Mr. Brown said. He was discharged and returned to his hometown, Peru, Ind., where he slept for two weeks in his Ford Explorer, surrounded by mementos of the war.

"I just couldn't stand to be with anybody," said Mr. Brown, 35, sitting at his father's kitchen table.

Dr. Batten started him on the road to recovery by giving his torment a name, an explanation and a treatment plan. But 18 months after leaving Iraq, he takes medication for depression and anxiety and returns in dreams to the horrors of his war nearly every night.

The scenes repeat in ghastly alternation, he says: the Iraqi girl, 3 or 4 years old, her skull torn open by a stray round; the Kuwaiti man imprisoned for 13 years by Saddam Hussein, cowering in madness and covered in waste; the young American soldier, desperate to escape the fighting, who sat in the latrine and fired his M-16 through his arm; the Iraqi missile speeding in as troops scramble in the dark for cover.

"That's the one that just stops my heart," said Mr. Brown. "I'm in my rack sleeping and there's a school bus full of explosives coming down at me and there's nowhere to go."

Such costs of war, personal and financial, are not revealed by official casualty counts. "People see the figure of 1,200 dead," said Dr. Kanter, of Seattle, referring to the number of Americans killed in Iraq. "Much more rarely do they see the number of seriously wounded. And almost never do they hear anything at all about the psychiatric casualties."

As of Wednesday 5,229 Americans have been seriously wounded in Iraq. Through July, nearly 31,000 veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom had applied for disability benefits for injuries or psychological ailments, according to the Department Veterans Affairs.

Every war produces its medical signature, said Dr. Kenneth Craig Hyams, a former Navy physician now at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Soldiers came back from the Civil War with "irritable heart." In World War I there was "shell shock." World War II vets had "battle fatigue." The troubles of Vietnam veterans led to the codification of post-traumatic stress disorder.

In combat, the fight-or-flight reflex floods the body with adrenaline, permitting impressive feats of speed and endurance. But after spending weeks or months in this altered state, some soldiers cannot adjust to a peaceful setting. Like Mr. Brown, for whom a visit to a crowded bank at lunch became an ordeal, they display what doctors call "hypervigilance." They sit in restaurants with their backs to a wall; a car's backfire can transport them back to Baghdad.

To prevent such damage, the Army has deployed "combat stress control units" in Iraq to provide treatment quickly to soldiers suffering from emotional overload, keeping them close to the healing camaraderie of their unit.

"We've found through long experience that this is best treated with sleep, rest, food, showers and a clean uniform, if that is possible," said Dr. Thomas J. Burke, an Army psychiatrist who oversees mental health policy at the Department of Defense. "If they get counseling to tell them they are not crazy, they will often get better rapidly."

To detect signs of trouble, the Department of Defense gives soldiers pre-deployment and post-deployment health questionnaires. Seven of 17 questions to soldiers leaving Iraq seek signs of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

But some reports suggest that such well-intentioned policies falter in the field. During his time as a platoon leader in Iraq, Mr. Rieckhoff said, he never saw a combat stress control unit. "I never heard of them until I came back," he said.

And the health screens have run up against an old enemy of military medicine: soldiers who cover up their symptoms. In July 2003, as Jeffrey Lucey, a Marine reservist from Belchertown, Mass., prepared to leave Iraq after six months as a truck driver, he at first intended to report traumatic memories of seeing corpses, his parents, Kevin and Joyce Lucey, said. But when a supervisor suggested that such candor might delay his return home, Mr. Lucey played down his problems.

At home, he spiraled downhill, haunted by what he had seen and began to have delusions about having killed unarmed Iraqis. In June, at 23, he hanged himself with a hose in the basement of the family home.

"Other marines have verified to us that it is a subtle understanding which exists that if you want to go home you do not report any problems," Mr. Lucey's parents wrote in an e-mail message. "Jeff's perception, which is shared by others, is that to seek help is to admit that you are weak."

Dr. Kilpatrick, of the Pentagon, acknowledges the problem, saying that National Guardsmen and Reservists in particular have shown an "abysmal" level of candor in the screenings. "We still have a long ways to go," he said. "The warrior ethos is that there are no imperfections."


Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.

------------------------------------------------------------------
Citation:
Scott Shane, "A Flood of Troubled Soldiers Is in the Offing, Experts Predict," New York Times, 16 December 2004.

A poll governed by fear:
millions will get no chance to vote, and the war will go on

Patrick Cockburn
The Independent
19 December 2004

The Iraqi election on 30 January, for which campaigning began last week, will be one of the most secretive in history. Iraqi television shows only the feet of election officials rather than their faces, because they are terrified of their identity being revealed. It will be a poll governed by fear.

Those fears were amply borne out yesterday when insurgents launched attacks on election offices in northern Iraq. Two people were killed and eight wounded when mortars landed on an election office in Dujail, one of many around the country registering and educating potential voters. Two Iraqis were killed in execution-style shootings and four American contractors were wounded by a roadside bomb in other incidents.

When Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister, announced his slate of candidates for the 275-member National Assembly in Baghdad last week, it was to a small audience of American security guards. The venue had been changed at the last minute to baffle potential assassins, and foreign journalists deemed it too dangerous to attend.

Shopkeepers distributed registration forms, tucked into the bags of monthly rations on which most Iraqis depend for survival. In Sunni districts in Baghdad some shopkeepers, fearing execution by the resistance, had begged their customers not to reveal where they got the forms.

There is now little doubt that the elections will go ahead. The Sunni political powers, fearing mass abstention by their constituents, would like a delay. But they could provide no convincing argument that the security situation will be any better in six months. Hoshyar Zebari, the powerful foreign minister, argued that "a delay in holding the election would be taken as a sign of weakness", and the interim government is doing what it can to manipulate public opinion.

Announcements that former members of the Saddam regime will go on trial this week, starting with the notorious "Chemical Ali", Ali Hassan al-Majid, are seen as electioneering more than anything else. The same applies to news yesterday that judges had begun interrogating him and another top suspect.

It is doubtful if the election, at least at first, will mark a real change in the balance of power between the three main communities in Iraq: the Shia, the Sunni and the Kurds. Nor is it likely to see a shift in authority from the US to Iraqis. The outcome could simply be a photocopy of the present government.

Few votes will be cast in the Sunni cities, towns and villages strung along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers north of Baghdad. Even if voters did want to go to the polls, it would be extremely dangerous to do so in places where anybody seen co-operating with the US is a target.

American and British officials persistently underestimate the extent to which all of Iraq is unstable. President George Bush and Tony Blair genuinely appear to believe that there are only limited trouble spots in Iraq and the rest of the country is at peace. Since the beginning of the insurgency, Washington and London have portrayed it as confined to the so-called "Sunni triangle" west and north of Baghdad. The phrase is designed to minimise the extent of the uprising, but in reality there is guerrilla warfare in all the Sunni towns and cities as well as Baghdad.

As US generals were issuing triumphant claims of victory in Fallujah, with a population of 300,000, last month they lost control of Mosul, 250 miles to the north, with a population of 1.2 million. The unexpected insurgent uprising on 10 November, which led to the disintegration of the 8,000-strong police force, was clearly planned to take advantage of the US assault on Fallujah on 8 November.

In the most militant cities there is no sign of insurgent activity diminishing: Every day there are attacks on US and interim government forces in Baiji, Baquba, Ramadi, Samarra and Tal Afar. Fallujah itself is far from subdued. Ayham al-Samarrai, the minister of electricity, told The Independent on Sunday that it would be difficult to hold fair elections in provinces with a total population of eight million - a third of the Iraqi population.

Most serious of all is the situation in Baghdad. US military briefings give the impression that Fallujah has been the heart of the uprising since the invasion. In reality the deadliest location for a US soldier in Iraq is Baghdad, where 240 US troops have been killed since March last year, more than twice as many as in Fallujah. It is the capital that may witness the most violence as the election gets closer.

Whatever the outcome of the poll, the five million Sunni in Iraq are numerous enough to continue the uprising. The feeling that their community is being disenfranchised may increase support for the resistance. Because all Iraq is being treated as a single constituency, the Sunni may have few representatives. Had each of the 18 provinces in Iraq been allocated a set number of deputies to the National Assembly, then the Sunni provinces would be represented, despite a low turnout.

Voters will go to the polls in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Shia districts of Baghdad, and in southern Iraq. Ever since the US invasion overthrew Saddam Hussein in April last year, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has demanded an election in which the Shia could show that they make up between 15 and 16 million of the 25 million Iraqi population.

But power in Iraq today grows out of the barrel of a gun. When Dr Hussain al-Shahristani, the highly respected and influential nuclear scientist tortured and imprisoned by Saddam Hussein, announced the Shia electoral list earlier this month, it was in the Convention Centre in the Green Zone in Baghdad, protected by US soldiers.

Ayatollah Sistani, the most influential Shia religious leader, is behind the Shia list, but it is not quite clear how far behind. The list may not elect 120 to 130 members of the National Assembly, as it expects.

The Shia leaders, though they have agreed an electoral pact, are deeply divided. At the head of the list is Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a party long based in Iran. Perhaps the most popular politician in Iraq is Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the head of one of factions of the Dawa party. But the list also includes Ahmed Chalabi, once the choice of the Pentagon to be the new leader of Iraq.

Mr Allawi, the surprise choice as interim Prime Minister, could go on holding the job, for the same reason he got it in the first place: the main players can live with him. The most important of these is the US. "There is simply no one else on whom the National Assembly could reach consensus," a senior official from a leading Shia party was quoted as saying. "Kurds would rather deal with Allawi than an Islamist Shia. So would Sunnis. We also realise that an Islamist Shia prime minister is a red line for the Americans."

But Mr Allawi has shown that he looks first of all to Washington for instructions. He supported the assault on Fallujah, despite the bloodshed. Militarily he is dependent on the US army. This might not damage him in the eyes of many Iraqi voters if he had satisfied their desire for security or improved the supply of electricity and fuel. Unfortunately for him the shortages are getting worse.

The police and the National Guard lack legitimacy. Often they are not prepared to fight the resistance. During the uprising in Mosul last month, the insurgents captured 10 police stations, some of them simply by phoning ahead and telling the police to get out.

The problems for the US and the interim government will be largely unchanged after the election. The Sunni will not stop their uprising while the occupation continues. The government will still depend on American guns to defend it. The differences between the three main Iraqi communities are increasing, and the war will go on.

c. 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

------------------------------
Citation: Patrick Cockburn, "A poll governed by fear: millions will get no chance to vote, and the war will go on," The Independent, 19 December 2004; Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=594551

War Strategy: Dramatic Failure Requires Drastic Change

Douglas A. Macgregor
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
19 December 2004

Dispensing with reality is not uncommon in Washington, but in wartime, it is downright dangerous and that is exactly what has been going on to date in Iraq. It is one thing to go to war with the Army and the generals you have, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argued a few days ago. Nearly two years later, however, both should be different and they are not. That's the real problem.

Americans are discovering that the Desert Storm formula for quick, cheap victories over incompetent enemies was always an illusion. Despite its initial showy successes on television reminiscent of the first Gulf War, Operation Iraqi Freedom was fundamentally flawed. Other than removing Saddam Hussein from power, Operation Iraqi Freedom lacked a coherent strategic design. When American forces finally reached Baghdad in April 2003, the military offensive simply dissipated.

We were lucky. Without the relatively short three week campaign to defeat a very weak opponent mounted in Somali-like pickup trucks or "technicals," the U.S. Army would have shot its bolt, plunging into a war for which there was too little body armor, ill-prepared leaders and very few ready, deployable combat troops. Even with 640,000 soldiers on active duty in today's U.S. Army, 40% of which are reservists, the Army's generals are still unable to squeeze the required combat capability out of an anachronistic Cold War ground force. Americans are beginning to ask what happened in the 12 years between Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom? The answers are grim.

The notion of a bloodless victory in 1991 reinforced misguided notions of how Army forces should fight. All future Army operations in Southwest Asia had to look like Desert Storm hence, Rumsfeld's fight with the generals. These illusions exacted a price. Despite 12 years of experience in Southwest Asia since Desert Storm, surprisingly little was done by a succession of Army Chiefs of Staff to prepare the Army, its soldiers or its equipment, for the complex tasks that would confront them during intervention in an Islamic country.

Nothing was done to refit the Army's 8 hour, gas-guzzling tanks with new fuel-efficient engines. Nothing was done to reorganize an anachronistic supply system. Nothing was done to reduce the superfluous bureaucratic overhead of Army three and four-star commands, to convert spaces for clerks into spaces for soldiers who deploy and fight. The one significant change was the collective decision by the Army's four-star generals in 1998 to cut 25% of the Army's combat troops an action with profoundly negative consequences in Iraq where battalions and brigades are too small to do the job.

Fast-forward to 2003 and we see American soldiers arrive in Baghdad with no detailed maps of the city, no new rules of engagement to follow, no new civil order to impose. Chaos and criminality ruled for 30 days while the Army generals stood motionless. General "Tommy" Franks, USCENTCOM Commander, and Lieutenant General Dave McKiernan, 3rd Army Commander, did not plan backward from victory. Their obsession with fighting a weak, inept enemy seems to have obscured the criticality of keeping the real objective in mind to replace the old bad regime with a better one.

Without attainable political objectives beyond the vague goal of transforming Iraqi Arabs into Anglo-Saxon democrats, the Army's division commanders soon became provincial governors inside static division sectors on the Vietnam model. The alternative a less intrusive presence on the Army's Special Forces model linked to local tribal and clerical authorities but backed by powerful mobile armored reserves capable of quickly smashing real opposition was not seriously considered. Iraqi soldiers, police and government workers who might have filled the security vacuum on the local level, became part of the resistance when we rewarded their non-defense of Saddam Hussein's regime by throwing them out of work.

The results were disastrous. When the generals occupied Saddam Hussein's old digs in Baghdad sending a chilling message to Arabs that they had exchanged an Arab dictatorship for an American one, the liberation was transformed into a hated occupation. We didn't get it. Most of the generals and politicians did not think through the consequences of compelling American soldiers with no knowledge of Arabic or Arab culture to implement intrusive measures inside an Islamic society. We arrested people in front of their families, dragging them away in handcuffs with bags over their heads and then provided no information to the families of those we incarcerated. In the end, our soldiers killed, maimed and incarcerated thousands of Arabs, 90% of whom were not the enemy. But they are now.

Through the summer and fall of 2003, whenever journalists noted the rising crescendo of violence and hatred in Central Iraq, the generals were quick to point to huge areas of the country that were quiet. However, the commanding generals did not direct the reallocation of significant ground combat forces from quiet areas to crush the known pockets of resistance in Central Iraq when it was much easier to do so.

While the lethality of every weapon in ground combat went up, the level of armor protection, firepower and off-road mobility for our soldiers in Iraq went down as tanks and armored fighting vehicles were replaced with HUMMVEEs.

In April, the outburst of violence across Iraq temporarily suspended these romantic notions because General John Abizaid realized that with fewer than 100 operational American tanks, American control of Iraq was at risk without the protection and devastating firepower of American armor. Within days, additional armor was flown into Iraq from Germany and it was temporarily back to basics including heavy armor, with lots of firepower and net-centric capabilities as an enhancement, not as a substitute for fighting power.

Today, there are nearly 600 American tanks in Iraq and the casualties sustained by the Armored force in fights from Falujah to Mosul have been extremely light compared with the thousands of American soldiers and marines killed or wounded in light infantry and support units.Yet, the passion for sending soldiers and marines into the teeth of the enemy on foot or in wheeled vehicles persists with deadly results for our soldiers and marines

What we are witnessing in Iraq is a symptom of a very familiar problem - peacetime military leadership under wartime conditions. Peacetime leaders are selected, trained and groomed in a system that promotes those who protect the system, adhere to process over results and give their superiors the answer they want to hear, "Yes."

So now what? Can we just muddle through, putting bandaides on gaping wounds, adding armor to HUMMVEEs instead of using the thousands of tracked, armored fighting vehicles sitting in storage? Can we keep on taking casualties while killing large numbers of Iraqis, hoping a new Iraqi government will eventually emerge that can control the country? When the January elections confirm Iraq's Shiite majority in power, many experienced observers think civil war is likely to follow. American soldiers and marines will be caught in the middle. What then?

It was Winston Churchill's rare gift to discern quickly what changes were implied by wartime conditions, and how policy should be adapted to meet new conditions. Churchill raged against the rigidity of mind in the senior ranks of the British Army during both World Wars. Sadly, without the intervention of a leader like Churchill, there is no guarantee that war will induce realistic change in the forces fighting the war on the ground in Iraq any time soon.

Controlling and managing the resources of a nation including its armed forces to the end that its vital interests are promoted and secured against enemies, actual or potential is what the president and Congress do. But vague expressions of support for the creation of new democracies where none exist do not constitute strategy. If America's goals were to seize and hold territory, to
increase the world's population under American authority, then intrusive military occupations lasting decades designed to forcibly transform foreign states into reflections of America would be the right response in war.

But these are not America's goals. Arabs, not Americans, must govern Arabs. At a price of 5.8 billion dollars a month, conditions in Iraq also cost a great deal of American money, money we must borrow from foreign sources to finance our growing deficit.

As the 911 Commission report indicated, it was wrong to allow the nation's intelligence agencies the freedom to define their own programs and priorities, control their own funding lines, and then rate their own effectiveness. French President, Georges Clemenceau, argued during WW I, "War is too important to be left to the generals." After losing hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen in a muddled war of attrition, Clemenceau could no longer afford to dispense with reality. The question is: How much longer can we afford to do it?

The author is a former Army Colonel and a decorated Gulf War combat veteran who authored three books. His latest is Transformation under Fire: Revolutionizing the Way America Fights (Praeger, 2003).

c. St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Citation: Douglas A. Macgregor, War Strategy: Dramatic Failure Requires Drastic Change," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 19 December 2004; Original URL: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/newswatch/story/74639B5932FF098686256F6F004B7C45?OpenDocument&Headline=War+Strategy%3A+Dramatic+failures+require+drastic+changes&highlight=2%2Cmacgregor

US media still hiding bad news from Americans

Antonia Zerbisias
Toronto Star
9 December 2004

And now the good news from America's accomplished mission in Iraq ...

The other night on ABC News Nightline, Ted Koppel asked National Public Radio war correspondent Anne Garrels, who has been in Iraq throughout the war, "When you hear people in this country, Anne, say, look, the media is only giving the negative side of what's going on there, why don't they ever show the good side, what do you tell 'em?"

"I tell them that there isn't much good to show," she replied, describing how even military commanders have only bad news to share.

Two weeks ago on CNN, Time's Michael Ware, who has been covering Iraq for two years, gave an alarming account of being trapped in his Baghdad compound, which is regularly bombed and encircled by "kidnap teams." He reported that the U.S. military has "lost control" and that Americans are "the midwives of the next generation of jihad, of the next Al Qaeda." At the end of the exchange, anchor Aaron Brown warned, "(O)ther people see the situation there differently than Michael. We talk to them as well."

The next day, when the interview was repeated, anchor Carol Lin closed with, "And of course there are others who disagree with that." Never mind that those others never had Iraqi sand in their shoes, let alone been under fire there.

"Freedom is on the march!" "We're making progress!" "The terrorists will do all they can to disrupt free elections in Iraq, and they will fail." These are just some of the slogans that U.S. President George W. Bush now spouts, while the American cable channels duly carry his speeches live and the American print media give them front-page play. Not that they aren't sneaking in a little bad news, mind you. But not much. This week, we learned, mostly via a text crawl at the bottom of the screen, that the milestone of 1,000 U.S. troops killed in combat had been reached.

If you blinked, you would have missed news of a Pentagon "strategic" report to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld revealing that U.S. actions "have not only failed, they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended." There was a bit in some newspapers about a damning classified cable from the Central Intelligence Agency's station chief in Baghdad that painted a dismal picture of Iraq's economic, political and security prospects. And, while it got notice when published in October, there's been no follow-up on a study in an esteemed British medical journal suggesting that up to 100,000 civilians had died since the invasion. No follow-up, that is, except to trash the research.

It figures that, on Tuesday in Camp Pendleton, California, all media eyes were on Bush giving a rousing crowd-pleaser, urging "every American to find some way to thank our military and to help out the military family down the street." That while yesterday Rumsfeld was in Kuwait, dismissing concerns from troops about a lack of armour. "You go to war with the army you have," he said.

Want to guess whose comments got better play?

"Biased coverage in Iraq; Bad News Overwhelms The Good," asserted the Washington Timeslast week. "If you trust most media accounts fed to American viewers and readers, Iraq is an unmitigated disaster," began Helle Dale of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, insisting that "40 per cent of Iraqis say their country is (now) better" and "at least 35 per cent want the United States to stay." Dale exhorted readers to check all the wonderful progress being catalogued by the U.S. Agency for International Development (http://www.usaid.gov), which, if you examine carefully, doesn't contain that much good news at all.

For example, compare and contrast one vaguely-worded USAID report from last spring with another from last week and you'll see the dirty water situation has not much improved. Still, Dale claims, "Much of this good work you will never find reported, precisely because no news is good news for much of the U.S. media."

Well, here's a positive piece of media news from Iraq: Farnaz Fassihi, the Wall Street Journal reporter whose harrowing private e-mail to friends describing the hazards of Baghdad made international news, is back on the war beat after what many suspected was a month-long suspension. She returns despite vicious criticism from the right that she is too "biased" to work there _ just because she felt it was a deadly situation. But then, what would she know? She's just there, in very real danger of getting killed. Stateside, she's threatened with being shot down, along with other reporters, just for telling the truth.

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Citation: Antonia Zerbisias, "US media still hiding bad news from Americans," Toronto Star, 9 December 2004.

You're Voting for Whom?

Rod Nordland
Newsweek
10 December 2004

Dec. 9 - The much-anticipated Shiite list of candidates for the forthcoming elections in Iraq was presented today_in partial anonymity and peculiar secrecy. This is the slate of candidates who will almost certainly win elections if they take place on schedule next Jan. 30. And in a few days it will have to begin campaigning.

The grouping of 228 candidates, a coalition running together as the newly formed United Iraqi Alliance, today formally filed for a place on the ballot at the Baghdad offices of the Independent Elections Commission for Iraq and then held a press conference at which representatives of the group refused to reveal the names of those on their list, or even who was at its head. A media spokesman for the IECI also refused to reveal the contents of the Shiite list. The head of the elections commission, Adel Hindawi, reached by telephone, said, "I haven't seen the list, and I don't know anything about it."

The United Iraqi Alliance list will presumably eventually become public, when the Dec. 15 deadline for candidates to file passes and campaigning begins_assuming that candidates do not contemplate campaigning in secrecy. The secrecy is apparently motivated by security concerns for some of those on the list, and by horse-trading still going on among members of the coalition over what positions they'll get in the new government. Some of the names on the list have come out, but the most stunning thing about it is who is left out: notably, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and his Iraqi National Accord party. This makes it almost impossible for Allawi to be re-elected prime minister, and could even mean he would not win a seat in the National Assembly.

Is this any way to run an election? Nothing about preparations for Iraq's first free poll has been easy. In a third of the country's provinces, nearly all of the country's Sunni Triangle, it's been nearly impossible to conduct voter registration. Sunnis, who are only 20 percent of the population but long ruled the country, have called for a delay in the elections until security conditions improve. Most of their leading organizations have called for a boycott of the vote; others have insisted on a delay of six months. Even Allawi, a secular Shia from an exile party, has suggested that the poll be conducted over a period of many days or weeks, to keep lines shorter and make the risk of attack less_a proposal the elections commission rejected today. Elections-commission officials have insisted that security at polling places will be provided only by the Iraqi police and National Guard_not by American or Coalition troops, so as not to intimidate voters or create the impression that the poll isn't independent. But Iraqi security forces have been reeling from one attack after another on their police stations and checkpoints, on individuals at home and on the highways. Even Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations diplomat who crafted the deal on an interim government to prepare these elections, has recently said he thinks the atmosphere is too violent for credible elections to take place.

The Shia, however, are having none of that_and American authorities seem determined to support their insistence that elections take place on schedule, no matter what. "Our operating assumption is that these elections will go forward," said U.S. ambassador John Negroponte at a recent lunch with a small group of American journalists in the former palace that is now the American embassy. Anti-election Sunnis, he suggested, still have plenty of time to change their minds and participate. "Do they really want to opt out of a constitutional convention that sets the political future of the country? Or do they want a seat at the table?" And a few prominent Sunnis have come out for elections, most notably the interim president, Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawer. Sunni leader Adnan Pachachi, an elder statesman with close ties to the Americans and Brahimi, was the architect of an abortive attempt at delaying the polls_but when that fell through, he was among the first to register his slate's candidacy. And despite the problems with voter-registration sites, the system set up by the U.N. under a small team led by veteran elections troubleshooter Carlos Valenzuela has a built-in solution. Most of Iraq's voters are passively registered, and only have to go to the centers if there is something wrong with their names on the voting rolls. The voting rolls are correlated with ration cards, which all Iraqi families have to enable them to get monthly supplies of donated food_ensuring that everyone will know if their registration is in order.

At the press conference announcing the list, organizers gave the names of the major parties that make up their coalition, although not the names of all the individuals on the list. They include the leading Shia parties, Hizbullah, the Supreme Commission for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party. In addition, the list included nonpoliticians, independents such as Hussain Shahristani, a nuclear physicist and an intimate of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani who was one of the organizers behind the UIA.

Some analysts see Allawi's omission as a plus: the prime minister's popular support has eroded dramatically since he took office June 30, in a deal engineered by the Americans and approved reluctantly by the U.N. As violence increased, and basic public services and reconstruction stalled, Allawi's government has taken much of the blame. Also off the Shiite list is Moqtada al-Sadr, the young radical whose anti-American insurgency was brought to a halt after Sistani intervened in August. Sadr had been negotiating for a position on the Shiite list, but in the end, according to Shahristani, he and his followers did not register as political parties or entities, and so could not join the coalition. "The Sadrist movement announced that it supports the religious authorities and its call for Iraqis to hold elections," Shahristani told reporters. "It also supports the list."

There was a stunning inclusion in the list, as well_Ahmad Chalabi and his exile-based Iraqi National Congress party. Chalabi, initially supported by the American government as a potential replacement for Saddam, has fallen into disfavor with the United States after a series of scandals and even allegations that he was working with Iranian intelligence. The State Department had long butted heads with the Pentagon over Chalabi, and INC figures have been accused in Congress of fabricating evidence on weapons of mass destruction to provoke the United States into invading Iraq. Chalabi's fall from grace culminated in a raid by U.S. troops on his homes and offices in Baghdad seven months ago, and Allawi's government briefly brought corruption charges against him. In addition, he has negligible support among non-exile Iraqis. But Chalabi has close ties with Iran, and recently has forged a relationship with both Sistani, an Iranian-born cleric, and with Sadr.

The UIA is an attempt to broaden the Shia list from a purely sectarian basis, and it is indeed more than just Shia religious parties_the major ones_and leading Shia individuals like Shahristani. "I think that this list is a patriotic list," said one of its leaders, Sheikh Fawaz al-Jarba, leader of a large Sunni tribe from the Mosul area. There are also secular groups, Kurdish Shia, Turkomen and Yazidi sect members on the Shia list_although apparently no Christians, another leading minority that initially had wanted to join the alliance. But just how many of the candidates on the UIA list are non-Shia is unknown. "The agreement that was reached, was that we should not discuss the names [of candidates] at the present time," said Dawa Party official Ali al-Deeb, who was one of the candidates, at the press conference. "We are not going to mention the names, neither in this conference nor in another one." But Chalabi insisted it was not a secret list. "The names of the candidates are a matter of public record." Once, of course, the public record is released, and so far the elections commission has not announced any intention to do so.

What is certain is that most on the Shia list will win these elections if they do take place. Shahristani said the marjaya, the Shiite supreme religious leadership, and Grand Ayatollah Sistani, its preeminent figure, appointed the six-member committee that put the coalition together. That gives it Sistani's implicit endorsement at the very least. And Shahristani even left open the possibility that Sistani might explicitly endorse the slate. "Whether he will support the list or not, is not known, but he has encouraged all Iraqis to participate in the elections," Shahristani said.

The voting system set up for Iraq by the former American civil administration is proportional, with parties running a slate of candidates elected on a national basis. That means that the seats in the 275-member National Assembly will be awarded to each slate proportional to the number of votes each wins. So if the UIA wins 60 percent of the vote, it will get 60 percent of the seats, with the remainder going to the losing slates similarly. In that case, candidates whose names are near the top of the list are all but guaranteed election, even in losing slates; while those near the bottom have less chance. Thus the order in which the candidates' names appear on the list is vital_and UIA spokesmen refused to say even who the top ones were, let alone their order. Aides to Chalabi, however, said he is in the top 15 of the UIA list. And a source at SCIRI named the No. 1 position as going to Sayid Ali al-Hakim, who is Sistani's representative in Basra; as a nonpolitician, he was a compromise to stop bickering among parties on who got top billing. Sayid Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of SCIRI, is No. 2; an unidentified woman third, and the current interim vice president, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, is fourth, these sources say. Shahristani himself is No. 7 on the list, while Chalabi is 10th.

Complicating the distribution of names on the list is the requirement that 25 percent of the names be women_and the Shia list, its representatives said, included 33 percent women, though none were among the eight candidates who revealed themselves at the press conference, and no women's names were released. Women lower down on the list will be given preference in the award of assembly seats, to keep with the requirement that at least one quarter of the assembly be female.

The new assembly will elect a prime minister and a cabinet, and will also preside over a constitutional convention to write a new constitution, which will then go to a referendum sometime next year. Then the first constitutional national elections will be held, in December 2005. Hopefully, by then, Iraqis will know in advance who they're voting for.

c 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

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Citation: Rod Nordland, "You're Voting for Whom?," Newsweek, 10 December 2004; Original URL:
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6689439/site/newsweek/

Bungling raids by US troops fuel Iraqi anger

Anthony Loyd
Times (London)
11 December 2004

IT WAS dawn and "the Doc", a tall rangy figure of 21, was crouched beside the door of a building, a dark silhouette with a pump-action shotgun.

The Doc _ real name Henry Grundle, an infantryman and medic with the US 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment _ was entry man for a raid on a suspected insurgent safehouse in Zangora, 8km (five miles) northeast of Ramadi. "Don't use the shotgun unless you have to," a senior officer whispered behind him. "Don't use the _" Blam! The Doc blew the locks off, kicked open the door and led the rush inside.

"Get down, get down," the raiders screamed, the flashlights on their assault rifles dazzling a group of Iraqi men wrenched from their sleep by the soldiers' violent entry. The Americans swarmed through the compound, corralling the women and children into one room and the men _ by then cuffed and blindfolded _ into another as the search for munitions and documents began.

Household goods were sent clattering to the floor, mattresses and bedding upturned, the contents of cupboards and drawers spilt on to a growing pile of personal effects and domestic items. Across the wakening town dogs barked and engines rumbled as US units converged on similar targets.

"Er . . . we're in the wrong house," Sergeant Hendrix announced quietly as the troops began questioning the blindfolded Iraqis. "Our target is 100 metres south."

If US commanders in Zangora, al-Anbar province, heartland of the Sunni insurgency, dream of winning the battle for Iraqi hearts and minds, then every coalition raid must be a nightmare.

The graffiti "One shot, one hit. NYC 9/11" graced the helmet of the Doc's five-man team commander, Sergeant Eric Santiago, 25. The sergeant, a tough man from the Bronx, had kept his men alive since their arrival in Iraq in September.

They had expected trouble in Iraq and found it: shot at, bombed and, in Fallujah last month, clashing with insurgents in full-on street fighting. Their brief for the mission in Zangora had warned them that it was a hotbed of guerrilla activity and home to several escaped Fallujah insurgents, so they were going in as they new best _ but what was any of it achieving?

The scene in the second house they raided, apparently the "real" target, was as awful as the first. With no interpreter, and lacking even an Arabic leaflet to explain their mission, the American troops burst in to find a startled Iraqi family sitting on the floor ready for breakfast. The family's two men were blindfolded and plasticuffed. "We have done nothing wrong," the elder detainee, Hatam Moslah Jabar, 20, pleaded quietly in English. "This is a big insult for us." A student of Shakespeare and Wordsworth at al-Anbar University, he seemed an unlikely insurgent suspect. Thirty minutes later he was released, along with every other detainee the squad had captured that morning, with a slap on the backside and shout of "Run. Get going!"

Sergeant Santiago's team found neither a weapons cache nor a single insurgent in the dozen houses they checked. Iraqis _ even a crippled woman in her eighties _ were questioned on the whereabouts of weapons and sometimes, if they were men, plasticuffed and blindfolded, sometimes humiliated and threatened. Just before the operation ended and the troops withdrew to Ramadi, the Doc forgot himself. The team had entered a house and found only an Iraqi man in his thirties and a young baby. The Doc put a cigarette to his mouth and raised a lighter.

"Hey, Doc! What the f*** ya doing, man?" exclaimed Sergenat Santiago as the rest of the squad joined in a chorus of dissent. "You can't goddamn smoke here! You might give the kid asthma or some s***! Don't go givin' no one else your cancer! Smokin' in front of a kid _ Jesus!"

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Citation: Anthony Loyd, "Bungling raids by US troops fuel Iraqi anger," Times (London), 11 December 2004.

Seeds of Chaos

Edward T. Pound
US News & World Report
11 December 2004

In the fall of 2002, several months before the United States and its allies invaded Iraq (news - web sites), Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) dispatched more than 1,000 security and intelligence officers to two military facilities near Baghdad where they underwent two months of guerrilla training, according to a secret U.S. military intelligence report. Anticipating his defeat, intelligence reports show, the Iraqi dictator began laying the foundation for an insurgency as Washington worked to convince the United Nations (news - web sites) and allies around the world that Saddam had to go.

The insurgency that has gripped much of Iraq the past 19 months wears many faces and has many different actors. But Baath Party operatives linked to Saddam, along with Sunni extremists from both inside and outside Iraq, have played a central role in resisting U.S.-led forces and the creation of a new democratic government in Baghdad. Although Saddam and many of his relatives and top aides have been captured or killed, American intelligence officials and others say that his supporters remain a formidable foe. "I believe that Saddam regime elements are still playing a significant role in the insurgency," says Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon (news - web sites) official who recently returned from a fact-finding mission to Iraq. "Of course, there are many other insurgents--radical Islamists supported by Iran, for example--but most certainly, Saddam planned his insurgency long before we invaded Iraq."

Until now, it hasn't been clear how Saddam created his guerrilla force or what role he played in directing attacks against U.S. troops and allied forces on the ground. But classified intelligence reports, reviewed by U.S. News, provide the clearest picture yet of his role in planning and carrying out an insurgency before he was captured in his "spider hole" last December, near his hometown of Tikrit. They also detail the roles some key regime aides have played in the insurgency.
The reports cover the period July 2003 through early 2004; they are based on interviews with Iraqis and other sources throughout Iraq, including fighters captured by U.S.-led forces. Most of the reports were prepared by U.S. analysts and military intelligence officers, although they also include assessments by British intelligence officials. The reporting organizations include the CIA; the Defense Intelligence Agency; the Iraq Survey Group, which was dispatched to Iraq to hunt for weapons of mass destruction; the Coalition Provisional Authority, the caretaker government in Iraq until last June; and various American military commands and units on the ground.

Although many of the raw intelligence reports are uncorroborated, interviews with current and former government officials indicate that information linking Saddam to early planning of an insurgency was right on the money. In his public report issued in October, Charles Duelfer, the chief weapons inspector for the Iraq Survey Group, suggested that Saddam was planning an insurgency as the U.S.-led invasion neared in March 2003. Duelfer wrote: "In Saddam's last ministers' meeting . . . just before the war began, he told the attendees at least three times, 'Resist one week, and after that I will take over . . .' There are indications that what Saddam actually had in mind was some form of insurgency against the coalition."

Project 111. Thousands of pages of secret intelligence reports reviewed by U.S. News spell out some of Saddam's plans in vivid detail, along with the activities of other elements of the insurgency. Saddam, the reports say, reportedly established "new subversive organizations"--including Jaish Muhammad, known as the Army of Muhammad, and the Black Falcons--to carry out attacks against coalition forces. The reports say he also directed regime leaders and supporters to use Sunni mosques for clandestine meeting places, and several reports describe how mosques were used to store weapons. Saddam, the reports say, sought to create a secret communications network, code named Project 111, and also reportedly developed Plan 549, a scheme to attack water plants throughout Iraq.

In one of their most important discoveries, coalition forces uncovered a July 2003 Baath Party memo that provides rare insight into the insurgency being carried out by former Saddam operatives. A report distributed to the intelligence community by Intelink, the highly classified government website, describes the memo: "The document outlined the recommended structure for resistance groups fighting coalition forces. . . . The document dictates the need for secrecy and directs a transition to covert operations. . . . Memo highlights: Organization of cells was to be small and closed in order to prevent penetration by coalition forces (five members). . . . Members were encouraged to avoid written communication and common party language; days, numbers, and locations should be encoded. Emergency operations are listed for situations when member of cell or group is detained . . . . Party members should have their loyalties continuously tested and always have a cover story prepared for their activities."

According to the secret reports, insurgents linked to Saddam or his supporters carried out numerous attacks and bombings, sometimes at his direction. One military report linked the Oct. 26, 2003, rocket attack on the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying, to a relative of a Saddam crony, Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as "Chemical Ali" for his purported role in the 1988 chemical attack on Kurdish villagers.

Numerous reports indicate that Saddam's forces were working with foreign terrorists, including al Qaeda, in carrying out some attacks on coalition forces and Iraqi citizens. "Many Iraqis," wrote a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst in November 2003, "believe foreign terrorist groups are collaborating with Saddam to conduct attacks." Another report, prepared by a military analyst, said al Qaeda was providing funds to some former Iraqi military personnel: "Al Qaeda is capitalizing on the current economic plight of former military members and local Iraqis by enticing them with monetary rewards." Uncorroborated reports from informers suggested that al Qaeda and former regime members also were behind a bombing that killed Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, a leading Shiite cleric, in August 2003. Others also were suspected in Hakim's murder, which remains unsolved.

Saddam's firepower came from what intelligence reports describe as "former regime elements," or FRE s. In a 10-page "special analysis" of the FRE s prepared Dec. 8, 2003, just days before Saddam's capture, the DIA's Joint Intelligence Task Force said that Saddam and his allies "appear to have planned for an insurgency before the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom." The report describes the FRE s as primarily Sunnis who once served under Saddam, including the paramilitary force, the Fedayeen Saddam, the Iraqi Intelligence Service, the Special Security Organization, the Special Republican Guard, and former Baath Party leaders.

According to the report, which cited "multiple sources," the FRE s' insurgency has "grown in coordination, command and control, and lethality." Former regime elements, it says, trained in "guerrilla and terrorist tactics" and had access to small arms, mortars, rockets, and other weapons, including man-portable surface-to-air missiles. "FRE s retain access to virtually all the weapons systems and ordnance previously controlled by the Iraqi military, security, and intelligence assets," the report says, citing "unsecured arms depots and storage sites. "FRE s' prewar "operating and support structure, access to resources, and training and capabilities," the report says, "make them the greatest threat of all anticoalition groups in the near term." It concludes that the FRE s "are assessed to be behind the majority of attacks" in Iraq.

"Last Friday's Army. " That assessment remains true today, says Army Brig. Gen. John DeFreitas, the Pentagon's senior intelligence officer in Iraq. In an interview, DeFreitas said that while the insurgency has many faces, the former regime elements clearly are the biggest problem. Some insurgents remain loyal to Saddam, the general said, but what they really want is to return to power. "You have a power struggle going on here," DeFreitas explained. "The old regime controlled the reins of power in the country for years, and they are not willing to let them go without a fight."

Others ascribe a range of motivations to the insurgents. "The vast majority," says Anthony Cordesman, a prominent defense analyst and Middle East expert, "are Sunni Arabs motivated by nationalism, religion, fear of loss of power to the Shiites, anger at [the] U.S., anger at occupiers, and sometimes profit or simply being caught up in events."

Sorting out the elements of the insurgency is mind-boggling work and may help explain why coalition forces have had such a difficult time keeping the peace in Iraq. For one thing, no one seems to really know how many insurgents there actually are. Estimates range to as high as 20,000, but current and former government officials say coalition forces simply don't know how many there are. Ahmed Hashim, a professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College, has studied the insurgency and concluded in a paper last summer that the "insurgency is not a monolithic, united movement directed by a leadership with a unitary and disciplined ideological vision." David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector for the Iraq Survey Group, agrees. "There is still no agreement" in U.S. government circles," Kay says, "on what the insurgency is--its structure and command."

Given the mayhem in the provinces of Baghdad, Anbar, Salah ad Din, and Ninawa, such confusion seems understandable. The insurgency includes not just Sunnis and former Baathists who want to turn back the clock but also militant jihadists and foreign fighters determined to make their stand in Iraq. Each day, it seems, another terrorist group is born, albeit sometimes with very few members. They have had names such as "the Army of Hawks," the "Jihad al-Islam," and "Last Friday's Army." Nearly 1,300 U.S. military personnel have died in the Iraqi conflict.

Militant Shiites, primarily the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, also have fought fierce battles with coalition forces in Najaf and Baghdad, although Sadr reached a cease-fire in October with the United States and Iraq's interim government. In addition, according to the intelligence reports reviewed by U.S. News, Iraq's next-door neighbor, Iran, set up an intelligence network in Iraq in the months after U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam, helped finance Sadr, and trained terrorists and planned attacks against U.S. forces. Iran's role in Iraq was detailed last month by this magazine.

Whatever their motivation, the insurgents all want the U.S-led coalition out of Iraq. To that end, there have been some strange marriages. Ansar al-Islam, a Sunni Muslim group of Iraqi Kurds and Arabs that has carried out some of the most violent attacks, is believed to have ties to the Fedayeen Saddam paramilitary force. But the terrorist group also has worked with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to intelligence reports. Saddam's regime and Tehran were bitter enemies; the two countries fought a brutal eight-year war in the 1980s. "We think a lot of the groups will work together, short term, for tactical benefits," a senior U.S. military intelligence official says. "The short-term goal is to get us out of [Iraq], and that allows for tactical cooperation."

Whether Saddam has discussed his role in the insurgency with his captors isn't known, but there is little question about the importance of that role. In the fall of 2002, according to a report issued by the Pentagon's Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, Saddam ordered between 1,000 and 1,200 officers to undergo guerrilla training at military facilities at Salman Pak and Bismayah, near Baghdad. "Young and talented officers" from the Iraqi Intelligence Service, the Directorate of Military Intelligence, and the Directorate of General Security "were chosen to attend two months of training," the task force report says. "The officers were assigned numbers and aliases while in training. Saddam Hussein numbered himself 'No. 1.' " The officers "were told to prepare themselves for recontact following the collapse of the regime," the report says. In August, as the insurgency grew more violent, the report continues, the officers were directed to begin attacks on the coalition: "Network commanders stated they were prepared to provide money, cars, and explosives."

The officers weren't alone. The Army of Muhammad and another militant group linked to Saddam known as Hizb al Awda (the Party of the Return) also began planning attacks, according to other military intelligence reports.

They were to include bombings against oil pipelines, electrical plants, and military convoys, the report says, as well as assassinations of Iraqi government officials and other Iraqis "suspected of cooperating with western and U.S. militaries."

The Army of Muhammad, a Baathist group composed of former intelligence, security, and police officers in Saddam's regime, has been a particular source of trouble. It publicly claimed credit for downing an American Chinook helicopter in November 2003, near Fallujah, that killed 16 Americans. It was also heavily involved in the recent battle in Fallujah, west of Baghdad. In an intelligence report in late 2003, an analyst at coalition headquarters in Baghdad wrote that the Army of Muhammad "uses cash bonuses, as well as health and death benefits, to recruit members." Army leadership, the report says, uses "a combination of nationalism and Sunni Islamic zealotry to motivate its fighters." Another report identified Sayf al-Din Fulayyih Hasan, who was chief of staff of Saddam's Republican Guard, as a principal leader of the group. He remains at large.

Saddam's allies, at his reported direction, planned and carried out attacks against Iraqi police, in an intimidation campaign. Another Saddam-linked group, the Black Falcons, was tasked to target coalition forces with improvised explosive devices, or IED s. According to an Iraq Survey Group intelligence report, the Black Falcons were directed by former military and intelligence officials loyal to Saddam. Still other reports say that Saddam targeted water plants. A report prepared at the military's coalition headquarters in Baghdad tells the story: "Plan 549, a document purporting to provide guidance from Saddam Hussein to his forces . . . calls for attacks on water plants. Such attacks could be devastating in terms of the populace's confidence in the coalition and public order." In late November 2003, U.S.-led forces "detained an individual who had over 40 videotapes of water purification sites throughout Iraq," a military task force report said. "The tapes were used for reconnaissance for future attacks."

Agents in place. The intelligence provides no clarity on how Saddam communicated with insurgents loyal to him. But one report, a "daily threat assessment" issued in December 2003 by the Iraq Survey Group and the Coalition Provisional Authority, makes it clear that Saddam was actively directing his forces. "Previous reporting indicates Saddam Hussein had sent a communique to his supporters," the report says, "indicating a more concerted effort should be made to capture coalition forces to exchange for captured former regime elements."

Several former Saddam aides were identified in the reports as key figures in the insurgency. They include Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, who was chairman of the regime's National Security Council, and Muhammad Yunis al-Ahmed, a leader in the Baath Party's Military Bureau. Both men remain at large. In a raid last December on a Samarra safe house, allegedly controlled by Duri's associates, coalition forces discovered $1.94 million in cash. Duri and Ahmed, the reports say, have "provided guidance and funding" for insurgents who flocked to northern Mosul, one of Iraq's largest cities, both before and shortly after the invasion. One military assessment says that an estimated 1,200 fedayeen fighters were based in Mosul at the time of the invasion. Another "1,000 former military leaders and Baath loyalists have taken up residence since the fall of the regime," the report says. "Reporting indicates at least a dozen FRE groups are currently operating in the city." Mosul remains a serious trouble spot and a haven for former Saddam loyalists and some foreign terrorists, U.S. military officials say.

Infiltrating operations. Saddam's hand in the insurgency was not always clear to analysts, who repeatedly described attacks and planned operations as the handiwork of former regime elements or "former regime loyalists," without any specific reference to the individuals involved. One report, citing "foreign government service sensitive reporting," says Baath Party members were offering money to Iraqis and others to carry out assassinations and attacks on Iraqi infrastructure. Former regime intelligence officers also infiltrated coalition operations, including the Coalition Provisional Authority, and planted agents as journalists in some media operations, according to various reports. Former regime elements "are seizing the opportunity to place agents in positions that permit them to monitor all coalition activities from the inside," a headquarters military analyst in Baghdad wrote more than a year ago. "Background investigations of these individuals to try and eliminate possible spies will become a necessity if any semblance of both internal and operational security is to be maintained."

Numerous reports linked al Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam to former regime operatives. "Reporting suggests greater cooperation between FRE and various actors--foreign elements and criminals--to facilitate violence," a military analyst wrote last January. These insurgents, the analyst wrote, favored "standoff" terrorist techniques--remotely detonated car bombs, roadside bombs, and mortar and rocket attacks.

Saddam's role in the insurgency ended last December 13 when American troops finally captured the disheveled former dictator. It was quite a comedown for a man who had lived lavishly and killed and tortured with abandon for more than a quarter century. The way U.S. intelligence analysts saw it, just days later, Saddam's capture would change little about the insurgency. New leaders would spring up among the former regime elements, they wrote. And they predicted, accurately, that the insurgency's attacks would continue, and even worsen. "The capture of Saddam Hussein will not likely deter insurgents who are fighting to 'free Iraq' from occupation," wrote an analyst for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. "The perceived humiliation of the former Iraqi leader by current occupiers seen on international television, the lack of basic infrastructure needs, and the presence of foreign troops on Iraq's soil will continue to fuel support to a variety of terrorist groups."

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Citation: Edward T. Pound, "Seeds of Chaos," US News & World Report, 11 December 2004; Original URL:
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=926&u=/usnews/20041211/ts_usnews/seedsofchaos&printer=1

7 Marines Killed in Iraq's Anbar Province

Paul Garwood
Associated Press
13 December 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Seven U.S. Marines were killed in two separate incidents in Iraq (news - web sites)'s restive Anbar province, the military said Monday, a day after American warplanes pounded Fallujah with missiles as insurgents battled coalition forces in the city.

It was unknown if the deaths were connected to the fighting in the volatile western Iraqi city. In a statement, the military said the seven Marines with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force died while conducting "security and stabilization operations" in Anbar province, a vast region that comprises Fallujah and Ramadi. The statement gave no other details about the deaths, saying the release of more information could place U.S. personnel at risk. The military had earlier reported another U.S. Marine death Sunday in Anbar.

As of Monday, at least 1,296 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Fallujah was the scene of a weeklong U.S.-led offensive last month to uproot insurgents based in the city. The latest violence began when American and Iraqi forces clashed with guerrillas in several suburbs and ended with U.S. airstrikes on suspected insurgent hideouts.

"The strikes were conducted throughout the day and were called in by troops in (armed) contact with and observing the enemy moving from house to house," spokesman Lt. Lyle Gilbert said.
Fallujah resident Abdullah Ahmed said the fighting started after U.S. soldiers brought 700-800 men into the city to clear rubble from damage caused by November's offensive. "The clashes started as soon as the young men entered the city," Ahmed said. "The American troops were surprised and decided to launch military operations."

Elsewhere, two insurgents died after detonating their explosives-packed car alongside an American M1 Abrams battle tank in Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad, at about 10:45 a.m., military spokesman Staff Sgt. Robert Powell said. No soldiers were wounded and the tank sustained negligible damage.

Four decapitated bodies in civilian clothes were found south of Baghdad and their identities were unclear, police said. The victims, believed to be Iraqis, were found in Haswa, about 25 miles south of the capital.

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Citation: Paul Garwood, "7 Marines Killed in Iraq's Anbar Province," Associated Press, 13 December 2004; Original URL:
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&u=/ap/iraq_marines_killed&printer=1

Iraqis Confused Ahead of January Election

Omar Anwar
Reuters
12 December 2004

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - With seven weeks to go before landmark polls, Iraq (news - web sites)'s electoral body is stepping up a campaign to inform voters of their rights, but widespread ignorance remains among the electorate, interviews show.

Via a multi-million-dollar campaign on television and radio, newspapers, billboards, posters and seminars, the Independent Electoral Commission is trying to reach out to Iraq's estimated 14 million potential voters, some 55 percent of the population. It wants to inform them about how the electoral process will work and generate enthusiasm for an event many fear could be severely disrupted by insurgent attacks or the threat of them. The elections, scheduled for Jan. 30, will be Iraq's first fully democratic polls in decades -- the last proper vote before Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) came to power was in the late 1950s.

The commission, formed with the help of the United Nations (news - web sites) in May, is responsible for overseeing the elections, three of which take place on the same day -- for a national assembly, a Kurdish regional government and provincial councils. "After decades of tyranny and authoritarian regimes, Iraq has lost its electoral knowledge," Hussain Hendawi, the head of the electoral commission, told Reuters last week. "It will take many years to build the democratic process and that knowledge," he said, but added that "big steps" had been made in informing voters over the past three months.

While U.S. and Iraqi authorities will worry about security at the 9,000 polling sites, interviews with potential voters show the commission has its work cut out to generate awareness.

CONFUSION ABOUNDS

The key institution to be elected is the 275-seat national assembly, which will oversee the formation of a new government and appoint a commission to write a permanent constitution. Yet asked what Iraqis would vote for on Jan. 30, Maithem Modher, a 24-year-old computer company employee, was unclear. "We will vote to choose a president," he said. "If any person gets a majority, he will win the presidency."
Others were not sure when the election would take place. "On Jan. 15 we will elect a number of members and they will elect a constitution and a president," said Mortadha Hussein, 34, a shopkeeper. "I don't know how many members will be elected ... I only know that there are more then 200 political parties," he said. "I would be lying if I said I knew the parties or candidates."

While 230 parties have registered for the election, most of them are grouping into coalitions that will put forward a list of candidates. The number of votes for each list will determine the number of candidates on the list that get seats. Others seem confused about the nature of a free vote. Iraq's most influential Shi'ite cleric, Ali al-Sistani, has issued an edict saying all Shi'ites, who make up 60 percent of the population, must vote, but hasn't said for which party.

Others believe the outcome's already decided. "Iraq will be one constituency and the parliament seats will be allocated according to the ethnic and sectarian majority," said Amir Ghazi, 23, a university science student, who believed Shi'ites were already destined to get 120 seats.

Despite the confusion -- and the fact many others say they won't vote while U.S. troops remain on Iraqi soil -- Hendawi remains upbeat. "We're still trying to inform people about the process," he said. "(But) we believe a large percentage will participate. We're confident the process will be historic all over Iraq."

Citation: Omar Anwar, "Iraqis Confused Ahead of January Election," Reuters, 12 December 2004; Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&u=/nm/20041212/ts_nm/iraq_election_dc_1&printer=1

Discontent Plaguing Military

Associated Press
11 December 2004

WASHINGTON - Soldiers always gripe. But confronting the defense secretary, filing a lawsuit over extended tours and refusing to go on a mission because it's too dangerous elevate complaining to a new level. It also could mean a deeper problem for the Pentagon: a lessening of faith in the Iraq mission and in a volunteer army that soldiers can't leave.

The hubbub over an exchange between Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and soldiers in Kuwait has given fresh ammunition to critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy. It also highlighted growing morale and motivation problems in the 21-month-old war that even some administration supporters say must be addressed to get off a slippery slope that could eventually lead to breakdowns reminiscent of the Vietnam War.

For thousands of years, soldiers have grumbled about everything from their commanders to their equipment to shelter and food. But challenging a defense secretary to his face is rare. So is suing the military to keep from being sent back to a combat zone. "We are seeing some unprecedented things. The real fear is that these could be tips of a larger iceberg," said P.J. Crowley, a retired colonel who served as a Pentagon spokesman in both Republican and Democratic administrations and was a White House national security aide in the Clinton administration. "The real issue is not any one of these things individually. It's what the broader impact will be on our re-enlistment rates and our retention," Crowley said.

Several Iraq-bound soldiers confronted Rumsfeld on Wednesday at a base in Kuwait about a lack of armor for their Humvees and other vehicles, about second-hand equipment and about a policy keeping many in Iraq far beyond enlistment contracts. Their pointed questions were cheered by others in the group. The episode - the questions and Rumsfeld's testy responses were captured by television cameras and widely reported - did not raise new issues. Complaints about inadequate protection against insurgents' roadside bombs and forced duty extensions have been sounded for months. But not so vividly.

President Bush and Rumsfeld offered assurances that the issues of armor and equipment were being dealt with, and that the plainspoken expression of concerns by soldiers was welcome. "I'd want to ask the defense secretary the same question," Bush said, if the president were a soldier in overseas combat. "They deserve the best," he added.

The display of brazenness in Kuwait came just two days after eight U.S. soldiers in Kuwait and Iraq filed a lawsuit challenging the military's "stop loss" policy, which allows the extension of active-duty deployments during times of war or national emergencies. In October, up to 19 Army reservists from a unit based in South Carolina refused orders to drive unarmored trucks on a fuel supply mission along attack-prone roads near Baghdad, contending it was too dangerous. The Pentagon is still investigating the incident. "Tensions obviously are rising," said Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former adviser to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. "The fact is that you do need now to consider how to change the force structure: the role of the reserves, the role of the actives. Troops are being deployed in continuing combat under what are often high risk conditions for far longer periods than anyone had previously considered or planned for."

When the war began in March 2003, the troops were predominantly active duty military. Today, National Guard and Army Reserve units make up about 40 percent of the force. The growing restiveness of U.S. troops in the Middle East echoes a drop in optimism at home that a stable, democratic government can be established in Iraq. A new poll for The Associated Press by Ipsos-Public Affairs shows that 47 percent of Americans now think it's likely Iraq can establish such a government, down from 55 percent in April.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan on Friday said that Bush "is committed to making sure our troops have the best equipment and all the resources they need to do their jobs. And that's exactly what he expects to happen."

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Citation: "Discontent Plaguing Military," Associated Press, 11 December 2004; Original URL: http://www.military.com/Content/Printer_Friendly_Version/1,11491,,00.html?str_filename=FL%5Fgripe%5F121104&passfile=FL%5Fgripe%5F121104&page_url=%2FNewsContent%2F0%2C13319%2CFL%5Fgripe%5F121104%2C00%2Ehtml

One million U.S. troops have gone to war

Mark Benjamin
UPI
09 December 2004

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 (UPI) -- Nearly a million U.S. troops have been deployed for war in Iraq or Afghanistan since those conflicts began, according to Pentagon data. The data also show that one out of every three of those service members has gone more than once.

The Pentagon confirmed to United Press International Wednesday that a cumulative total of 955,000 troops from all military services had been deployed for Operation Iraqi or Enduring Freedom by the end of September. More than 300,000 of those troops have been deployed more than once, the Pentagon said. One government source said the total number of troops deployed has likely hit 1 million since then.

The Pentagon data shows that 708,000 of the troops who have served in war come from the active duty force. That means that roughly half of the United States' 1.4 million active duty troops have gone to war. Slightly more than 245,000 troops from reserve and National Guard units have also been deployed.

Military experts said the new data show the American military is being stretched to its limits -- or beyond. "It shows that we are short of troops. I don't think there is any question about that," retired Marine Corps three-star general Bernard E. Trainor told UPI. "Nobody, or almost nobody, anticipated specifically how this thing was going to turn out." Trainor said he believed the military has not struggled with these kinds of numbers since Vietnam. "The military is stretched entirely too thin," Trainor said.

The war in Iraq is less than two years old. There are 140,000 troops in Iraq now and 16,000 in Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon.

Speaking to troops in Kuwait this week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld got an earful of complaints about aging equipment, a lack of armored vehicles and soldiers who say they are being kept on active duty beyond what they were told.

Trainor told UPI that when soldiers take the unusual step of bucking their leadership in public it is a sign of trouble. "It is a danger signal that there is eroding support in the ranks for the civilian leadership," Trainor said. One soldier in Kuwait asked Rumsfeld if the stress on the armed forces might weaken the country's ability to fight back against another terror attack. Rumsfeld responded that the country has "well over 2.5 million people we can call on at any given time. So you can be sure that we have the capability we need."

"There are elements of the force, however, that have been stressed and we read a lot about that and we hear a lot about that on television and it is a fact," Rumsfeld said. But he added that is "not because we have too few total forces, it's because we have not had the right balance between the active and reserve." A Pentagon spokesman could not provide a breakdown of where the 955,000 troops have been deployed.

The data details the number of active duty and guard and reserve troops from the different services who have been deployed:

- Active duty Army: 280,000
- Army National Guard: 90,000
- Army reserve: 65,000
- Coast Guard: 1,500
- Coast Guard reserve: 200
- Air National Guard: 41,000
- Air Force 151,000
- Air reserve: 23,000
- Active duty Marines: 99,000
- Marine reserve 15,000
- Active duty Navy: 177,000
- Navy reserve: 11,000.

Copyright c 2001-2004 United Press International

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Citation: Mark Benjamin, "One million U.S. troops have gone to war," UPI, 09 December 2004.