US
troops voice anger at Pentagon
By James Conachy
Last week witnessed an extraordinary event in Iraq. Uniformed
soldiers from one of the US Army’s main combat units
openly denounced Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on ABC
national news and demanded that they be brought home. Other
media outlets published interviews with soldiers declaring
that their morale was “non-existent.”
The eruption of anger was triggered by a July 14 announcement
that there was no longer a firm date for the withdrawal from
Iraq of the 1st and 2nd Brigades of the Third Infantry Division.
The news contradicted assurances made the previous week by
division commander Major General Blount, Rumsfeld himself
and General Tommy Franks that the units would be back in the
US by September. It brought an abrupt end to the homecoming
preparations by both the Third Infantry soldiers and their
wives and families at the unit’s bases in Georgia. A
military spokesman stated: “That time frame has basically
gone away, and there is no time frame.” The change in
plans is believed to have been prompted by the Indian government’s
refusal to send 17,000 troops to assist the Bush administration
in the occupation of Iraq.
The reaction of troops of the Third Infantry’s 2nd
Brigade ranged from mutinous to despondent.
Specialist Clinton Deitz told ABC News: “If Donald
Rumsfeld was here I’d ask him for his resignation.”
Sergeant Felipe Vega said he felt “kicked in the guts,
slapped in the face.” Private Jayson Punyhotra declared
that “it pretty much makes me lose faith in the Army.”
Referring to the decks of cards carrying the photographs of
Iraqi leaders that were given to US soldiers, a sergeant who
asked to remain unnamed told the ABC reporters: “I’ve
got my own ‘Most Wanted List.’ The aces in my
deck are Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and Paul
Wolfowitz.”
Sergeant Siphon Pahn told the Los Angeles Times: “Tell
Donald Rumsfeld the 2nd Brigade is stuck in Fallujah, and
we’re very angry.” Another soldier told the paper:
“People say Rumsfeld needs to get out office.”
Sergeant Eric Wright told BBC News: “We’re exhausted.
Mentally and physically exhausted to the point that someone
hoped they would get wounded so they could go home. ‘Hey
shoot me, I want to go home.’”
Specialist Sean Gilchrist told Knight-Ridder correspondents:
“It feels like we’re forgotten, like we fell off
the planet.” Private Anthony Mondello told Knight-Ridder:
“All b.s. aside, our morale is gone, it really is.”
An officer who declined to be named told the news service:
“It doesn’t seem like anybody higher up cares
to realize what these soldiers have been through, or what
they’re going through on a daily basis. I can guarantee
you they’ve never stood out in a checkpoint in the heat
of the day, day after day, full battle rattle, always wondering
if today’s the day somebody’s going to shoot me.
Do they even care?”
Private Jason Ring spoke to the San Francisco Chronicle in
Fallujah: “We liberated Iraq. Now the people here don’t
want us here, and guess what? We don’t want to be here
either. So why are we here? Why don’t they bring us
home?”
Army wives in the US denounced the White House in equally
vitriolic terms. Julie Galloway, the wife of a sergeant, told
the Associated Press: “They’ve bald-faced lied
to us.” Tasha Moore, the wife of a captain, declared:
“My solution for President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld
and all those people is just keep your mouth shut. If you
don’t know the truth, don’t say anything at all.
Every time a soldier is shot and killed it comes to mind—is
that my husband? I don’t think the government understands
what a husband or a wife or children are going through every
day.”
The US Army is considering disciplinary action against the
men. The new commander of the US forces in Iraq, General John
Abizaid, told a press conference on July 16: “None of
us that wear this uniform are free to say anything disparaging
about the Secretary of Defense or the President of the United
States. We’re not free to do that. It’s our professional
code. Whatever action may be taken, whether it’s a verbal
reprimand or something more stringent, is up to the commanders
on the scene and it’s not for me to comment.”
The American media, in typical fashion, sensationalized the
insubordinate statements and moved on to the next story. For
a number of reasons, however, they merit deeper consideration.
They testify to a staggeringly rapid disintegration in the
cohesion of the US military occupation of Iraq.
There is undoubtedly widespread weariness and battle fatigue
among troops in units like the Third Infantry. The division
was kept in a fever pitch of readiness for a war on Iraq more
or less since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on the
US. In March 2002, it was ordered to maintain a brigade presence
in Kuwait indefinitely—with the 3rd Brigade undertaking
the first six-month tour of duty. During September and October
2002, it was replaced by the 2nd Brigade. By March 2003, in
the countdown to the invasion, the entire division was in
Kuwait.
The horrors the soldiers saw and the atrocities they committed
during the war are another factor. The Third Infantry was
among the first US military units to cross into Iraq and carried
out the main thrust on Baghdad, capturing the city’s
international airport on April 3. According to numerous reports
at the time, the soldiers passed by the corpses of hundreds
of Iraqis who had been slaughtered by US air strikes. The
division conducted its own mass killings in Baghdad. On April
5, it was the tanks of the 2nd Brigade that carried out the
three-hour rampage through the city’s southern suburbs
that left as many as 3,000 Iraqi soldiers and civilians dead
and thousands more wounded. A soldier told the New York Times:
“There were people lying all over the side of the road.
I couldn’t even count how many.” Men who had participated
in such acts would understandably want to place as much distance
between themselves and Iraq as possible.
By far, the most critical factor in military morale, however,
is ideological commitment. Throughout history, soldiers have
endured immense privations and, even if defeated, maintained
loyalty to their commanders and belief in the cause for which
they were sent to fight. The fact that just four months after
invading Iraq American troops want no part in the post-war
occupation can only be understood as a judgment on the war
itself. American soldiers know that the justifications for
the war were lies.
They also know that whatever support existed for attacking
Iraq at home is rapidly evaporating as it sinks in that Iraq
had no “weapons of mass destruction” and was never
a threat to the US. The American people, and the soldiers
in particular, have been left with the sick feeling in their
stomachs that tens of thousands of Iraqis and more than 225
Americans have been killed so that the Bush administration
could carry out the neo-colonial conquest of an oil-rich and
strategically important country.
The Bush administration lie that has had perhaps the most
demoralizing effect on the soldiers was the claim they would
be treated as “liberators.” This propaganda was
drilled into American soldiers for more than a year before
the war. Instead, they have confronted a civilian population
that overwhelmingly despises them as invaders and will provide
a never-ending stream of recruits to the anti-American resistance
movements.
The 2nd Brigade, for example, has since May been policing
Fallujah—one of the most restive of Iraq’s major
cities. The Los Angeles Times reported on July 15 on the reaction
the brigade received when it attempted to give away frozen
chickens in an attempt to “win the hearts and minds”
of the population. At a number of mosques, the local Sunni
imams refused to accept the food. One cleric told the American
troops: “We would rather eat rocks than eat chickens
from Americans. Even the poorest person in Fallujah doesn’t
want chickens from you.” Soldiers were forced to drive
the truckload of chickens back through a hail of stones and
bricks from local children.
Other units face a similar situation in the numerous cities,
towns and villages between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers
where the majority of the Iraqi population lives.
Based on the prediction that the Iraqi people would welcome
US forces, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asserted before
the invasion that a force of just 40,000 to 60,000 US troops
would be sufficient for a post-war occupation. Three months
after “victory,” 146,000 US troops cannot claim
to be in control of Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country.
On an average day, one American soldier dies somewhere in
Iraq—at least 88 deaths since May 1—and between
five and ten are wounded. Military convoys traveling along
the main six-mile, six-lane highway between the airport and
Baghdad, for example, do so at the constant risk of attack.
Last Monday, one US soldier was killed and 10 wounded when
a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) struck a vehicle. An American
paratrooper at the scene told the Washington Post: “Unless
you put a tank every 10 feet, there’s nothing you can
do.”
Another US convoy was attacked with RPGs in Baghdad last
Wednesday, killing one American and wounding six. The same
day, two other attacks in Baghdad wounded three US troops,
while the US-appointed Iraqi mayor of Hadithah, to the west
of the capital, was assassinated. On Friday, a remotely detonated
bomb struck a convoy crossing a bridge near Fallujah. Three
vehicles were damaged, at least one soldier from the Third
Infantry was killed and an unreported number were wounded.
Over the weekend, three US troops were killed in Baghdad and
Mosul, and a mass anti-American demonstration was held in
Najaf by Shi’ite Muslims—the Iraqis whom the White
House insisted would be the most enthusiastic supporters of
a US invasion.
Based on the historical experience of guerrilla warfare,
it will not be long before the resistance movements learn
how to inflict far greater casualties. On July 17, for the
second time in two weeks, resistance fighters fired a surface-to-air
missile at a transport plane landing at Baghdad airport. Harlan
Ullman, an advocate of the war and one of the authors of the
“shock and awe” tactics of the invasion, responded
by warning: “What happens, for example, when they go
after a big airplane flying into Baghdad or blow up the Al-Rashid
hotel (in Baghdad)? We better be prepared.”
The Bush administration’s miscalculations and arrogant
self-delusion over what it perceived as unlimited American
power has left the US military in a quagmire. Soldiers in
Iraq are hearing that the US will have troops in the country
for up to 10 years, but at the same time they are being told
there are not enough troops to replace them. Of the Army’s
33 combat brigades, 16 are already in Iraq, 2 are in Afghanistan,
2 are in South Korea and 1 is still in Kosovo. Of the 12 brigades
in the US, 3 are in modernization training, 3 are in reserve
for possible deployment to a war on the Korean peninsula and
2 are pre-slated to relieve the troops in Afghanistan. Only
4 brigades are left to relieve 16.
There are indications that the debacle is fueling a long-running
conflict between Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and the Army
command. Articles appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Los
Angeles Times and New York Times giving voice to the Army’s
complaints that it is stretched to the limit and that the
prospect of being sent to Iraq is affecting both retention
and enlistment rates. The Pentagon is under pressure to take
unprecedented steps to relieve the Army personnel stranded
in Iraq. New assurances have been given that the Third Infantry
will be withdrawn soon. Marine units, which are not normally
used for “peace-keeping” actions, are likely to
be deployed. More controversially, it is being suggested that
as many as 10,000 part-time National Guardsmen will be called
up by the end of the year for a 13-to-16-month full-time period
of duty and sent to Iraq.
Even with such measures, anyone in or joining the US Army
can expect for the indefinite future to spend stressful, yearlong
tours in Iraq fighting and possibly dying in an unjustified
war of repression against legitimate guerrilla resistance.
Those who return will only be sent back to Iraq or on to another
overseas deployment after a brief break in the US. The inevitable
relationship breakups and other personal difficulties will
increase the trauma. There have already been nine deaths of
American servicemen in Iraq due to what the military calls
“non-hostile shootings”—often a euphemism
for suicide. How long will it be before distraught soldiers
begin shooting their officers or each other?
The pro-war mantra is always “Support the troops.”
The troops—mainly working class youth who joined the
military as a ticket to an otherwise unattainable college
education or some decent skills—correctly feel they
have no business in Iraq and want to come home. The occupation
is a monstrosity that must be ended by the immediate and unconditional
withdrawal of all American and foreign military forces.
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