February 17, 2005

The War of Iraq is Worse than Immoral, Illegal, It is Stupid, Insanely Stupid

The War of Iraq is Worse than Immoral, Illegal, It is Stupid, Insanely Stupid

Ray McGovern, www.truthout.org: We began with a moment of silence in his memory, and then imagined ourselves into the scene with the newspaper reporter who had spoken with Wichlacz' father, Dennis. We tried to anticipate questions Mr. Wichlacz might ask us:
Q. "How could our country have had such bad intelligence that President Bush was misled into starting this war?"
A. "I'm afraid it's not that simple, Dennis. The Bush administration decided to attack Iraq many months before any ‘intelligence' was adduced to ‘justify' such an attack. Yes, the intelligence conjured up was bad. But its target was Congress; even Colin Powell has admitted that. And the aim was to deceive our lawmakers into forfeiting to the Executive Congress' constitutional prerogative to authorize war."
Q. "But what about my son?... and the others who died? Why?"
A. "Oil."
In August 1992, Dick Cheney, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney under a very different President Bush, was asked to explain why US tanks did not roll into Baghdad and depose Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. Cheney said:
"I don't think you could have done that without significant casualties... And the question in my mind is how many additional casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not that damned many... And we're not going to get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq." Later, then-CEO Dick Cheney of Halliburton found himself focusing on different priorities. In the fall of 1999 he complained:
"Oil companies are expected to keep developing enough oil to offset oil depletion and also to meet new demand...So where is this oil going to come from? Governments and national oil companies are obviously in control of 90 percent of the assets... The Middle East with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies."
What had changed in the seven years between Cheney's two statements?
• The US kept importing more and more oil to meet its energy needs.
• Energy shortages drove home the need to ensure/increase energy supply.
• Oil specialists concluded that "peak oil" production was but a decade away, while demand would continue to zoom skyward.
• The men now running US policy on the Middle East appealed to President Clinton in January 1998 to overthrow Saddam Hussein or "a significant portion of the world's supply of oil will be put at hazard."
• In October 1998 Congress passed and Clinton signed a bill declaring it the sense of Congress that "it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein."
• International sanctions left a debilitated Iraq with greatly weakened armed forces headed by an "evil dictator."
Shortly after George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, Vice President Cheney's energy task force dragged out the maps of Iraq's oil fields. (We now have some of the relevant documents, courtesy of a bitterly contested Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. But the courts have upheld the White House decision to keep the task force proceedings, and even the names of its members, secret.)


Office of Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH): Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH) today said that Iraqi elections, to be held on Sunday, will be a farce. In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and John Negroponte, the United States Ambassador to Iraq, Kucinich cites a total absence of international election monitors in Iraq for Sunday's elections. The closest international monitors will get to Iraq on Sunday will be Amman, Jordan.
In the letter, sent today, Kucinich states,
"It is clear, in just five days before the Iraqi elections are to be held, that it will be impossible to conclude anything about the extent to which corruption, voter intimidation or outright fraud will mar the results. The exercise will regrettably be a farce. The results will have no recognized legitimacy whatsoever, and surely do not merit association with the United States' notions of democracy.
"The elections will not yield certifiable results due to the pitifully small number of election observers, and the total absence of international election observers from the process. Indeed, according to the Washington Post, this is the first transitional election in the past two decades that will not have international election observers touring polling stations. As you know, international monitors have independently observed and evaluated elections throughout the world and have helped to point out when they are fraudulent and when they are legitimate."
In previous transitional elections across the world, the international community has sent teams of observers to polling sites. International observers have observed recent transitional elections in Nigeria in 1999, Haiti in 1990, East Timor in 2001-2002, and most recently in the second runoff election in the Ukraine.
No international body will have election monitors in Iraq on Sunday. The International Mission for Iraqi Elections, led by Canada's chief electoral officer, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, and comprised of less than two dozen election experts from Australia, Bangladesh, Britain, Canada, Ghana, Hungary, Indonesia, Mexico, Panama and Yemen, will monitor the elections, not in Iraq, but instead operate from Amman, Jordan.
"I hope the Administration does not engage in wishful thinking that this farce of an election can beget anything other than farce. What a disservice we do to Iraqis who risk danger to cast their votes or run for office in this irredeemable formality. And what distortion of real democracy is being done in America's name: It will surely discredit the United States in the eyes of the world," Kucinich concludes in his letter.

LINDA MCQUAIG, Toronto Star: No matter how inspired the rhetoric, the U.S. project in Iraq has never been about democracy. It's been about getting control of Iraq's vast, virtually untouched oil reserves, and extending Washington's military reach over the region. "Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath; you can't ask for better than that," Wall Street oil analyst Fadel Gheit told me in an interview.
Bush officials never wanted to run Iraq themselves, but rather to have a loyal local do it for them. Before the invasion, their plan was simply to install the wealthy, CIA-groomed exile Ahmed Chalabi. They also drew up sweeping plans to privatize the entire Iraqi economy, including the oil sector — before the Iraqi people got to cast a single vote.
But the "iron fist of the U.S. army" has not been popular in Iraq, fuelling a resistance that has turned key parts of the country into a free-fire zone…
It sure looks like Washington plans to go on calling the shots in Iraq, but now there will be a plausible government to show off to the world. If Iraq's oil industry is put on the chopping block and ends up in the hands of U.S. oil companies, Washington will be off the hook; the decision will have been made by the "elected" Iraqi government.
At last — mission accomplished.

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA): We must learn from our mistakes. We must recognize what a large and growing number of Iraqis now believe. The war in Iraq has become a war against the American occupation.
We have reached the point that a prolonged American military presence in Iraq is no longer productive for either Iraq or the United States. The U.S. military presence has become part of the problem, not part of the solution.
We need a serious course correction, and we need it now. We must make it for the American soldiers who are paying with their lives. We must make it for the American people who cannot afford to spend our resources and national prestige protracting the war in the wrong way. We must make it for the sake of the Iraqi people who yearn for a country that is not a permanent battlefield and for a future free from permanent occupation…
No matter how many times the Administration denies it, there is no question they misled the nation and led us into a quagmire in Iraq. President Bush rushed to war on the basis of trumped up intelligence and a reckless argument that Iraq was a critical arena in the global war on terror, that somehow it was more important to start a war with Iraq than to finish the war in Afghanistan and capture Osama bin Laden, and that somehow the danger was so urgent that the U.N. weapons inspectors could not be allowed time to complete their search for weapons of mass destruction.
As in Vietnam, truth was the first casualty of this war. Nearly 1400 Americans have died. More than 10,000 have been wounded, and tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children have been killed. The weapons of mass destruction weren’t there, but today 157,000 Americans are.
As a result of our actions in Iraq, our respect and credibility around the world have reached all-time lows. The President bungled the pre-war diplomacy on Iraq and wounded our alliances. The label “coalition of the willing” cannot conceal the fact that American soldiers make up 80% of the troops on the ground in Iraq and more than 90% of the casualties.
The Administration also failed to prepare for the aftermath of “victory” – and so the post-war period became a new war, with more casualties, astronomical costs, and relentless insurgent attacks.
The Administration failed to establish a basic level of law and order after Baghdad fell, and so massive looting occurred.
The Administration dissolved the Iraqi army and dismissed its troops, but left their weapons intact and their ammunition dumps unguarded, and they have become arsenals of the insurgency.
The Administration relied for advice on self-promoting Iraqi exiles who were out of touch with the Iraqi people and resented by them – and the result is an America regarded as occupier, not as liberator.
The President recklessly declared “Mission Accomplished” when in truth the mission had barely begun. He and his advisors predicted and even bragged that the war would be a cakewalk, but the expected welcoming garlands of roses became an endless bed of thorns.
The Administration told us the financial costs would be paid with Iraqi oil dollars, but it is being paid with billions of American tax dollars. Another $80 billion bill for the black hole that Iraq has become has just been handed to the American people.
The cost is also being paid in shame and stain on America’s good name as a beacon of human rights. Nothing is more at odds with our values as Americans than the torture of another human being. Do you think that any Americans tell their children with pride that America tortures prisoners? Yet, high officials in the Administration in their arrogance strayed so far from our heritage and our belief in fundamental human decency that they approved the use of torture—and they were wrong, deeply wrong, to do that.
The Administration’s willful disregard of the Geneva Conventions led to the torture and flagrant abuse of the prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and that degradation has diminished America in the eyes of the whole world. It has diminished our moral voice on the planet.
Never in our history has there been a more powerful, more painful example of the saying that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Howard Zinn, Miami Herald: We must withdraw our military from Iraq, the sooner the better. The reason is simple: Our presence there is a disaster for the American people and an even bigger disaster for the Iraqi people.
It is a strange logic to declare, as so many in Washington do, that it was wrong for us to invade Iraq but right for us to remain. A recent New York Times editorial sums up the situation accurately: ``Some 21 months after the American invasion, United States military forces remain essentially alone in battling what seems to be a growing insurgency, with no clear prospect of decisive success any time in the foreseeable future.''
And then, in an extraordinary non sequitur: ``Given the lack of other countries willing to put up their hands as volunteers, the only answer seems to be more American troops, and not just through the spring, as currently planned. . . . Forces need to be expanded through stepped-up recruitment.''
Here is the flawed logic: We are alone in the world in this invasion. The insurgency is growing. There is no visible prospect of success. Therefore, let's send more troops? The definition of fanaticism is that when you discover that you are going in the wrong direction, you redouble your speed.

Alison Roberts, Guardian: So far, PTSD experts have seen a mere handful of British sufferers from this latest war in Iraq - but as the violence goes on, the trickle is expected to become a flood. Late last year, the independent inquiry into Gulf war illnesses chaired by Lord Lloyd of Berwick came to the conclusion that there was "every reason" to accept the existence of a Gulf war syndrome, and that post-traumatic stress was one of several contributing factors. Though the Ministry of Defence does not publish statistical predictions, military psychiatrists in America have been warned to expect psychiatric disorder to occur in a remarkable 20% of servicemen and women returning from Iraq.
"What we've got now is a situation starting to approximate to Northern Ireland or Bosnia, to civil insurrection rather than a straight shooting war," says Jones, who runs PTSD clinics around the country and at a residential centre in north Wales."In those kinds of circumstances, where you're experiencing hatred and violence from an unpredictable civilian population, we tend to get a lot of very disturbed and damaged soldiers." In the field of trauma studies, this atmosphere of constant and random danger is known by the shorthand "no safe place".
Other surveys suggest that roughly half the servicemen who suffer psychiatric illness as a result of traumatic events do not seek medical help, or do so years later, when the psychological afterburn has irreparably damaged marriages, careers and mental wellbeing. "And there's still a stigma attached," says Leigh Skelton, director of clinical services at Combat Stress, the ex-services mental welfare charity. "PTSD is seen as a career-stopper within the army. Generally, the first line of action servicemen and women take is to bottle it up. Then they'll self-medicate, usually with alcohol, sometimes with other substances. Cries for help often come from relatives rather than from the affected person."
Symptoms range from insomnia, nausea and extreme fatigue to the classic "flashback"; aggression, feelings of alienation and irrational anger. Sometimes the disorder centres on one particular memory. A 30-year-old female ambulance driver in the Territorial Army, for example, constantly replays the moment her vehicle was blown up last year by a hand-made bomb tied to a lamp-post in Basra. One marine in his early 20s now suffering chronic PTSD remembers "the fear in the eyes of an Iraqi soldier in the window" of a building mortared by the British; and seeing that fear again when British soldiers mistakenly opened fire on a civilian vehicle.


The War of Iraq is Worse than Immoral, Illegal, It is Stupid, Insanely Stupid

We Need the Oil, Right? So What's the Problem?
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 14 February 2005
Such openness is rare; it set me back on my heels. The question came last Monday as I finished a lecture in Pewaukee, Wisconsin–the first of a handful of talks I gave for "Great Decisions 2005," a program of the Institute of World Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
With the "weapons of mass destruction" of recent memory having evaporated as casus belli for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I had decided to experiment with a tutorial on what I believe to be the real reasons behind the war—first and foremost, oil. Passing by a phalanx of late-model gas-guzzlers on my way in, I found myself wondering how my observations on the oil factor would be received. In the end, I was more than a little surprised that none of the 250 folks in that very conservative audience seemed to have much of a problem.
The Most Recent Death
I had thought I was in for a much more difficult time. Among other things, the news had just broken that 22 year-old Lance Cpl. Travis M. Wichlacz of the Milwaukee-based Fox Company had become the fifth from that company, and the 33rd from Wisconsin overall, to be killed in action in Iraq. His stepmother told a reporter, "Travis was kicking down doors. They were going into houses and finding weapons caches and dismantling bombs." Cpl. Wichlacz died in a roadside bombing southwest of Baghdad on February 5.
We began with a moment of silence in his memory, and then imagined ourselves into the scene with the newspaper reporter who had spoken with Wichlacz' father, Dennis. We tried to anticipate questions Mr. Wichlacz might ask us:
Q. "How could our country have had such bad intelligence that President Bush was misled into starting this war?"
A. "I'm afraid it's not that simple, Dennis. The Bush administration decided to attack Iraq many months before any ‘intelligence' was adduced to ‘justify' such an attack. Yes, the intelligence conjured up was bad. But its target was Congress; even Colin Powell has admitted that. And the aim was to deceive our lawmakers into forfeiting to the Executive Congress' constitutional prerogative to authorize war."
Q. "But what about my son?... and the others who died? Why?"
A. "Oil."
Oil
Canadian writer Linda McQuaig, author of "It's the Crude, Dude", has noted that decades from now it will all seem a no-brainer. Historians will calmly discuss the war in Iraq and identify oil as one of the key factors in the decision to launch it. They will point to growing US dependence on foreign oil, the competition with China, India, and others for a world oil supply with terminal illness, and the fact that (as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has put it) Iraq "swims on a sea of oil." It will all seem so obvious as to provoke little more than a yawn.
But that will be then. Now is now. How best to explain the abrupt transition from early-nineties prudence to the present day recklessness of this administration? How to fathom the continued cynicism that trades throwaway soldiers for the chimera of controlling Middle East oil?
The Earlier Cheney on Our Soldiers
In August 1992, Dick Cheney, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney under a very different President Bush, was asked to explain why US tanks did not roll into Baghdad and depose Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. Cheney said:
"I don't think you could have done that without significant casualties... And the question in my mind is how many additional casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not that damned many... And we're not going to get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."
"Where the Prize Ultimately Lies"
Later, then-CEO Dick Cheney of Halliburton found himself focusing on different priorities. In the fall of 1999 he complained:
"Oil companies are expected to keep developing enough oil to offset oil depletion and also to meet new demand...So where is this oil going to come from? Governments and national oil companies are obviously in control of 90 percent of the assets... The Middle East with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies."
What had changed in the seven years between Cheney's two statements?
• The US kept importing more and more oil to meet its energy needs.
• Energy shortages drove home the need to ensure/increase energy supply.
• Oil specialists concluded that "peak oil" production was but a decade away, while demand would continue to zoom skyward.
• The men now running US policy on the Middle East appealed to President Clinton in January 1998 to overthrow Saddam Hussein or "a significant portion of the world's supply of oil will be put at hazard."
• In October 1998 Congress passed and Clinton signed a bill declaring it the sense of Congress that "it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein."
• International sanctions left a debilitated Iraq with greatly weakened armed forces headed by an "evil dictator."
Shortly after George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, Vice President Cheney's energy task force dragged out the maps of Iraq's oil fields. (We now have some of the relevant documents, courtesy of a bitterly contested Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. But the courts have upheld the White House decision to keep the task force proceedings, and even the names of its members, secret.)
To be fair, taking over Middle East oil fields was not a new idea. In 1975 Henry Kissinger, using a pseudonym, wrote an article for Harpers titled "Seizing Arab Oil," outlining plans to do just that, preventing Arab countries from having absolute control over the modern world's most vital commodity. But in those days there was a USSR to put the brakes on such adventurism.
Prize Lies
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has claimed that the conflict with Iraq "has nothing to do with oil," but those who do not limit their news intake to FOX are aware that his credibility is somewhat tarnished. After all, it was Rumsfeld who assured us, among other things, that he knew where Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" were located. And for a war supposedly not about oil, US military planners certainly gave extremely high priority to securing the oil fields—and even the Oil Ministry in Baghdad.
It will bring no consolation to young widow Angela Coakley, whom Cpl. Wichlacz married last May just before shipping out to Iraq, or to his parents to know that they are not the first to suffer immeasurable loss on false pretenses.
If any question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied.
Rudyard Kipling
No Static
In Pewaukee I fully expected such observations to cause some static, at least during the formal post-lecture Q&A session before most of the audience drifted off into a light snow. I was later advised not to misread the lack of demurral as concurrence, but rather to chalk it up to Mid-West reticence.
Some twenty folks did linger in a small circle that was dominated by a persistent, well dressed man (let's call him Joe), who just would not let go:
"Surely you agree that we need the oil. Then what's your problem? Some 1,450 killed thus far are far fewer than the toll in Vietnam where we lost 58,000; it's a small price to pay... a sustainable rate to bear. What IS your problem?"
I asked Joe if he would feel differently were it to have been his son that was killed, rather than Cpl. Wichlacz, but the suggestion seemed so farfetched as to be beyond Joe's ken. (And therein lies yet another important story). So I resorted to a utilitarian approach. "Joe, we're just not going to be able to control the oil in Iraq. The war is unwinnable. There are 1.3 billion Muslims, and they are very upset with us; they will not let us prevail."
But this too made little impact on Joe.
How about Because It's Wrong
I sized Joe up as one who would press for having the Ten Commandments prominently displayed in the courthouses of America. So I took a new tack, asking him, "Isn't one of those commandments about stealing... and one about killing... one about lying... and even one about coveting your neighbor's possessions? Would you think we might lop off those four and whittle the tablets down to the remaining six so as to spare ourselves potential embarrassment?"
Joe walked off to drive his gas-guzzler home.
________________________________________
Ray McGovern is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst spanned administrations from John F. Kennedy to George H. W. Bush.
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/021405Y.shtml

Kucinich: Iraq Elections Will Be A Farce; Closest International Election Monitors Will Get Will Be Amman, Jordan
In Letter To Secretary of State Rice and Ambassador Negroponte; Kucinich Cites Lack Of International Monitors

WASHINGTON -- January 26 -- Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH) today said that Iraqi elections, to be held on Sunday, will be a farce. In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and John Negroponte, the United States Ambassador to Iraq, Kucinich cites a total absence of international election monitors in Iraq for Sunday's elections. The closest international monitors will get to Iraq on Sunday will be Amman, Jordan.
In the letter, sent today, Kucinich states,
"It is clear, in just five days before the Iraqi elections are to be held, that it will be impossible to conclude anything about the extent to which corruption, voter intimidation or outright fraud will mar the results. The exercise will regrettably be a farce. The results will have no recognized legitimacy whatsoever, and surely do not merit association with the United States' notions of democracy.
"The elections will not yield certifiable results due to the pitifully small number of election observers, and the total absence of international election observers from the process. Indeed, according to the Washington Post, this is the first transitional election in the past two decades that will not have international election observers touring polling stations. As you know, international monitors have independently observed and evaluated elections throughout the world and have helped to point out when they are fraudulent and when they are legitimate."
In previous transitional elections across the world, the international community has sent teams of observers to polling sites. International observers have observed recent transitional elections in Nigeria in 1999, Haiti in 1990, East Timor in 2001-2002, and most recently in the second runoff election in the Ukraine.
No international body will have election monitors in Iraq on Sunday. The International Mission for Iraqi Elections, led by Canada's chief electoral officer, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, and comprised of less than two dozen election experts from Australia, Bangladesh, Britain, Canada, Ghana, Hungary, Indonesia, Mexico, Panama and Yemen, will monitor the elections, not in Iraq, but instead operate from Amman, Jordan.
"I hope the Administration does not engage in wishful thinking that this farce of an election can beget anything other than farce. What a disservice we do to Iraqis who risk danger to cast their votes or run for office in this irredeemable formality. And what distortion of real democracy is being done in America's name: It will surely discredit the United States in the eyes of the world," Kucinich concludes in his letter.
###
http://www.commondreams.org/news2005/0126-07.htm


http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar%2FLayout%2FArticle_Type1&c=Article&cid=1107039016034



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Jan. 30, 2005. 01:00 AM


Linda McQuaig says today's charade is simply about Iraq's oil
LINDA MCQUAIG

In the weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote approvingly of "the breath-taking audacity" of the Bush administration's plans for Iraq.
Friedman noted that the invasion would lead to "a long-term U.S. occupation" and that "Iraq will be controlled by the iron fist of the U.S. Army." Apparently he didn't regard any of this as a problem — just part of the job of remaking Iraq to fit the fantasies of U.S. policymakers.
Friedman's casual acceptance of Washington's right to redesign other countries — an attitude rampant among media commentators as well as U.S. officials — sheds light on why the occupation of Iraq has been such a disaster, and why there's little reason to believe Iraq is on the path to democracy.
No matter how inspired the rhetoric, the U.S. project in Iraq has never been about democracy. It's been about getting control of Iraq's vast, virtually untouched oil reserves, and extending Washington's military reach over the region. "Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath; you can't ask for better than that," Wall Street oil analyst Fadel Gheit told me in an interview.
Bush officials never wanted to run Iraq themselves, but rather to have a loyal local do it for them. Before the invasion, their plan was simply to install the wealthy, CIA-groomed exile Ahmed Chalabi. They also drew up sweeping plans to privatize the entire Iraqi economy, including the oil sector — before the Iraqi people got to cast a single vote.
But the "iron fist of the U.S. army" has not been popular in Iraq, fuelling a resistance that has turned key parts of the country into a free-fire zone.
Among other things, this makes meaningful elections impossible. If large numbers of people are too terrified to vote, the results won't reflect the popular will — yet they'll give an aura of legitimacy to a government that may represent a tiny minority.
But while useless in advancing real democracy, the election is highly useful to George W. Bush, who will point to a "democratic" transfer of power.
Questioned last week, Bush said the U.S. would withdraw if asked by the new government. Really?
Earlier in the week, the Pentagon acknowledged plans and budgets to keep 120,000 troops there for at least two more years.
It sure looks like Washington plans to go on calling the shots in Iraq, but now there will be a plausible government to show off to the world. If Iraq's oil industry is put on the chopping block and ends up in the hands of U.S. oil companies, Washington will be off the hook; the decision will have been made by the "elected" Iraqi government.
At last — mission accomplished.

http://kennedy.senate.gov/%7ekennedy/statements/05/1/2005127703.html

SENATOR EDWARD M. KENNEDY DISCUSSES AMERICA'S FUTURE IN IRAQ AT THE JOHNS' HOPKINS SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
January 27, 2005
________________________________________
For Immediate Release
CONTACT: Melissa Wagoner
(202) 224-2633
Address Delivered at the Johns’ Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

Thank you Dr. Fukuyama for that generous introduction.

I’m honored to be here at the School of Advanced International Studies. Many of the most talented individuals in foreign policy have benefited from your outstanding graduate program, and I welcome the opportunity to meet with you on the issue of Iraq.

Forty years ago, America was in another war in a distant land. At that time, in 1965, we had in Vietnam the same number of troops and the same number of casualties as in Iraq today.

We thought in those early days in Vietnam that we were winning. We thought the skill and courage of our troops was enough. We thought that victory on the battlefield would lead to victory in the war, and peace and democracy for the people of Vietnam.

We lost our national purpose in Vietnam. We abandoned the truth. We failed our ideals. The words of our leaders could no longer be trusted.

In the name of a misguided cause, we continued the war too long. We failed to comprehend the events around us. We did not understand that our very presence was creating new enemies and defeating the very goals we set out to achieve. We cannot allow that history to repeat itself in Iraq. //

We must learn from our mistakes. We must recognize what a large and growing number of Iraqis now believe. The war in Iraq has become a war against the American occupation.

We have reached the point that a prolonged American military presence in Iraq is no longer productive for either Iraq or the United States. The U.S. military presence has become part of the problem, not part of the solution.

We need a serious course correction, and we need it now. We must make it for the American soldiers who are paying with their lives. We must make it for the American people who cannot afford to spend our resources and national prestige protracting the war in the wrong way. We must make it for the sake of the Iraqi people who yearn for a country that is not a permanent battlefield and for a future free from permanent occupation.

The elections in Iraq this weekend provide an opportunity for a fresh and honest approach. We need a new plan that sets fair and realistic goals for self-government in Iraq, and works with the Iraqi government on a specific timetable for the honorable homecoming of our forces.

The first step is to confront our own mistakes. Americans are rightly concerned about why our 157,000 soldiers are there -- when they will come home -- and how our policy could have gone so wrong.

No matter how many times the Administration denies it, there is no question they misled the nation and led us into a quagmire in Iraq. President Bush rushed to war on the basis of trumped up intelligence and a reckless argument that Iraq was a critical arena in the global war on terror, that somehow it was more important to start a war with Iraq than to finish the war in Afghanistan and capture Osama bin Laden, and that somehow the danger was so urgent that the U.N. weapons inspectors could not be allowed time to complete their search for weapons of mass destruction.

As in Vietnam, truth was the first casualty of this war. Nearly 1400 Americans have died. More than 10,000 have been wounded, and tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children have been killed. The weapons of mass destruction weren’t there, but today 157,000 Americans are.

As a result of our actions in Iraq, our respect and credibility around the world have reached all-time lows. The President bungled the pre-war diplomacy on Iraq and wounded our alliances. The label “coalition of the willing” cannot conceal the fact that American soldiers make up 80% of the troops on the ground in Iraq and more than 90% of the casualties.

The Administration also failed to prepare for the aftermath of “victory” – and so the post-war period became a new war, with more casualties, astronomical costs, and relentless insurgent attacks.

The Administration failed to establish a basic level of law and order after Baghdad fell, and so massive looting occurred.

The Administration dissolved the Iraqi army and dismissed its troops, but left their weapons intact and their ammunition dumps unguarded, and they have become arsenals of the insurgency.
The Administration relied for advice on self-promoting Iraqi exiles who were out of touch with the Iraqi people and resented by them – and the result is an America regarded as occupier, not as liberator.

The President recklessly declared “Mission Accomplished” when in truth the mission had barely begun. He and his advisors predicted and even bragged that the war would be a cakewalk, but the expected welcoming garlands of roses became an endless bed of thorns.

The Administration told us the financial costs would be paid with Iraqi oil dollars, but it is being paid with billions of American tax dollars. Another $80 billion bill for the black hole that Iraq has become has just been handed to the American people.

The cost is also being paid in shame and stain on America’s good name as a beacon of human rights. Nothing is more at odds with our values as Americans than the torture of another human being. Do you think that any Americans tell their children with pride that America tortures prisoners? Yet, high officials in the Administration in their arrogance strayed so far from our heritage and our belief in fundamental human decency that they approved the use of torture—and they were wrong, deeply wrong, to do that.

The Administration’s willful disregard of the Geneva Conventions led to the torture and flagrant abuse of the prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and that degradation has diminished America in the eyes of the whole world. It has diminished our moral voice on the planet.

Never in our history has there been a more powerful, more painful example of the saying that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

The tide of history rises squarely against military occupation. We ignore this truth at our peril in Iraq.

The nations in the Middle East are independent, except for Iraq, which began the 20th century under Ottoman occupation and is now beginning the 21st century under American occupation.

Iraq could very well be another Algeria, where the French won the military battle for Algiers, but ultimately lost the political battle for Algeria.
Despite the clear lesson of history, the President stubbornly clings to the false hope that the turning point is just around the corner.

The ending of the rule of Saddam Hussein was supposed to lessen violence and bring an irresistible wave of democracy to the Middle East. It hasn’t. Saddam Hussein’s capture was supposed to quell the violence. It didn’t. The transfer of sovereignty was supposed to be the breakthrough. It wasn’t. The military operation in Fallujah was supposed to break the back of the insurgency. It didn’t.

The 1400 Americans killed in Iraq and the 10,000 American casualties are the equivalent of a full division of our Army – and we only have ten active divisions.

The tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed last year included nearly a thousand members of the new Iraqi security forces, and a hundred more have been lost this year. The recent killing of a senior Iraqi judge was the 170th assassination of an Iraqi official since June of 2003.

We all hope for the best from Sunday’s election. The Iraqis have a right to determine their own future. But Sunday’s election is not a cure for the violence and instability. Unless the Sunni and all the other communities in Iraq believe they have a stake in the outcome and a genuine role in drafting the new Iraqi constitution, the election could lead to greater alienation, greater escalation, and greater death – for us and for the Iraqis.

In fact, the Central Intelligence Agency’s top official in Baghdad warned recently that the security situation is deteriorating and is likely to worsen, with escalating violence and more sectarian clashes. How could any President have let this happen?

General Brent Scowcroft, who until recently served as Chairman of President Bush’s National Intelligence Advisory Board and who also served as the first President Bush’s National Security Adviser, recently warned of an “incipient civil war” in Iraq. He said, “the [Iraqi] elections are turning out to be less about a promising transformation, and it has great potential for deepening the conflict.”

President Bush’s Iraq policy is not, as he said during last fall’s campaign, a “catastrophic success.” It is a catastrophic failure. The men and women of our armed forces are serving honorably and with great courage under extreme conditions, but their indefinite presence is fanning the flames of conflict.

The American people are concerned. They recognize that the war with Iraq is not worth the cost in American lives, prestige, and credibility. They understand that this misbegotten war has made America more hated in the world, created new breeding grounds and support for terrorists, and made it harder to win the real war against terrorism – the war against Al Qaeda and radical jihadist terrorists.

Conservative voices are alarmed as well. As Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation, said last November, we are “stuck in a guerrilla war with no end in sight.”

As former Coalition Provisional Authority adviser Larry Diamond recently said, “There is a fine line between Churchillian resolve and self-defeating obstinacy.” We must recognize that line and end the obstinate policy of the Administration.

A new Iraq policy must begin with acceptance of hard truths. Most of the violence in Iraq is not being perpetrated – as President Bush has claimed – by “a handful of folks that fear freedom” and “people who want to try to impose their will on people…just like Osama bin Laden.”

The war has made Iraq a magnet for terrorism that wasn’t there before. President Bush has opened an unnecessary new front in the war on terror, and we are losing ground because of it. The CIA’s own National Intelligence Council confirmed this assessment in its report two weeks ago.

The insurgency is not primarily driven by foreign terrorists. General Abizaid, head of our Central Command, said last September, “I think the number of foreign fighters in Iraq is probably below 1,000…”. According to the Department of Defense, less than two percent of all the detainees in Iraq are foreign nationals.

The insurgency is largely home-grown. By our own government’s own count, its ranks are large and growing larger. Its strength has quadrupled since the transfer of sovereignty six months ago –from 5,000 in mid-2004, to 16,000 last October, to more than 20,000 now. The Iraqi intelligence service estimates that the insurgency may have 30,000 fighters and up to 200,000 supporters. It’s clear that we don’t know how large the insurgency is. All we can say with certainty is that the insurgency is growing.

It is also becoming more intense and adaptable. The bombs are bigger and more powerful. The attacks have greater sophistication.

Anthony Cordesman, the national security analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, recently wrote: “There is no evidence that the number of insurgents is declining as a result of Coalition and Iraqi attacks to date.”

An Army Reservist wrote the stark truth: “The guerillas are filling their losses faster than we can create them…. For every guerilla we kill with a smart bomb, we kill many more innocent civilians and create rage and anger in the Iraqi community. This rage and anger translates into more recruits for the terrorists and less support for us.” Our troops understand that. The American people understand it. And it’s time the Administration understand it.

Beyond the insurgency’s numbers, it has popular and tacit support from thousands of ordinary Iraqis who are aiding and abetting the attacks as a rejection of the American occupation. It is fueled by the anger of ever-larger numbers of Iraqis – not just Saddam loyalists - who have concluded that the United States is either unable or unwilling to provide basic security, jobs, water, electricity and other services.

Anti-American sentiment is steadily rising. CDs that picture the insurrection have spread across the country. Songs glorify combatants. Poems written decades ago during the British occupation after World War I are popular again.

The International Crisis Group, a widely respected conflict prevention organization, recently reported, “These post-war failings gradually were perceived by many Iraqis as purposeful,… designed to serve Washington’s interests to remain for a prolonged period in a debilitated Iraq.”

We have the finest military in the world. But we cannot rely primarily on military action to end politically inspired violence. We can’t defeat the insurgents militarily if we don’t effectively address the political context in which the insurgency flourishes. Our military and the insurgents are fighting for the same thing – the hearts and minds of the people – and that is a battle we are not winning.

The beginning of wisdom in this crisis is to define honest and realistic goals.

First, the goal of our military presence should be to allow the creation of a legitimate, functioning Iraqi government, not to dictate it.

Creating a full-fledged democracy won’t happen overnight. We can and must make progress, but it may take many years for the Iraqis to finish the job. We have to adjust our time horizon. The process cannot begin in earnest until Iraqis have full ownership of that transition. Our continued, overwhelming presence only delays that process.

If we want Iraq to develop a stable, democratic government, America must assist -- not control -- the newly established government.

Unless Iraqis have a genuine sense that their leaders are not our puppets, the election cannot be the turning point the Administration hopes.

To enhance its legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi people, the new Iraqi Government should begin to disengage politically from America, and we from them.

The reality is that the Bush Administration is continuing to pull the strings in Iraq, and the Iraqi people know it. We picked the date for the transfer of sovereignty. We supported former CIA operative Iyad Allawi to lead the Interim Government. We wrote the administrative law and the interim constitution that now governs Iraq. We set the date for the election, and President Bush insisted that it take place, even when many Iraqis sought delay.

It is time to recognize that there is only one choice. America must give Iraq back to the Iraqi people.

We need to let the Iraqi people make their own decisions, reach their own consensus, and govern their own country.

We need to rethink the Pottery Barn rule. America cannot forever be the potter that sculpts Iraq’s future. President Bush broke Iraq, but if we want Iraq to be fixed, the Iraqis must feel that they, not we, own it.

The Iraqi people are facing historic issues—the establishment of a government, the role of Islam, and the protection of minority rights.

The United States and the international community have a clear interest in a strong, tolerant and pluralistic Iraq, free from chaos and civil war.

The United Nations, not the United States, should provide assistance and advice on establishing a system of government and drafting a constitution. An international meeting – led by the United Nations and the new Iraqi Government -- should be convened immediately in Iraq or elsewhere in the Middle East to begin that process.

For our part, America must accept that the Shiites will be the majority in whatever government emerges. Sixty percent of the population in Iraq is Shiite, and a Shiite majority is the logical outcome of a democratic process in Iraq.

But the Shiites must understand that Iraq’s stability and security will be achieved only by safeguarding minority rights. The door to drafting the Constitution and to serving in government must be left open -- even to those who were unwilling or unable or too terrified to participate in the elections.

The Shiites must also understand that America’s support is not open-ended and that America’s role is not to defend an Iraqi government that excludes or marginalizes important sectors of Iraqi society. It is far too dangerous for the American military to take sides in a civil war.

America must adjust to the reality that not all former Baathists will be excluded from Iraqi political life in the new Iraq. After the Iron Curtain fell in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, many former communists went on to participate in the political process. The current Polish President – a strong ally of President Bush in Iraq – is a former active member of the Communist Party who served under Poland’s martial law government during the 1980’s. If communists can change in this way, there is no reason why some former members of the Baath party cannot do so.

If Iraqis wish to negotiate with insurgents who are willing to renounce their violence and join the political process, we should let them do so. Persuading Sunni insurgents to use the ballot, not the bullet, serves the interests of the Shiites too.

Second, for democracy to take root, the Iraqis need a clear signal that America has a genuine exit strategy.

The Iraqi people do not believe that America intends no long-term military presence in their country. Our reluctance to make that clear has fueled suspicions among Iraqis that our motives are not pure, that we want their oil, and that we will never leave. As long as our presence seems ongoing, America’s commitment to their democracy sounds unconvincing.

The President should do more to make it clear that America intends no long-term presence. He should disavow the permanence of our so-called “enduring” military bases in Iraq. He should announce that America will dramatically reduce the size of the American Embassy -- the largest in the world.

Once the elections are behind us and the democratic transition is under way, President Bush should immediately announce his intention to negotiate a timetable for a drawdown of American combat forces with the new Iraqi Government.

At least 12,000 American troops and probably more should leave at once, to send a stronger signal about our intentions and to ease the pervasive sense of occupation.

As Major General William Nash, who commanded the multinational force in Bosnia, said in November, a substantial reduction in our forces following the Iraqi election “would be a wise and judicious move” to demonstrate that we are leaving and “the absence of targets will go a long way in decreasing the violence."

America’s goal should be to complete our military withdrawal as early as possible in 2006.

President Bush cannot avoid this issue. The Security Council Resolution authorizing our military presence in Iraq can be reviewed at any time at the request of the Iraqi Government, and it calls for a review in June. The U.N. authorization for our military presence ends with the election of a permanent Iraqi government at the end of this year. The world will be our judge. We must have an exit plan in force by then. //

While American troops are drawing down, we must clearly be prepared to oppose any external intervention in Iraq or the large-scale revenge killing of any group. We should begin now to conduct serious regional diplomacy with the Arab League and Iraq’s neighbors to underscore this point, and we will need to maintain troops on bases outside Iraq but in the region.

The United Nations could send a stabilization force to Iraq if it is necessary and requested by the Iraqi government. But any stabilization force must be sought by the Iraqis and approved by the United Nations, with a clear and achievable mission and clear rules of engagement. Unlike the current force, it should not consist mostly of Americans or be led by Americans. All nations of the world have an interest in Iraq’s stability and territorial integrity.

Finally, we need to train and equip an effective Iraqi security force. We have a year to do so before the election of the permanent Iraqi government.

The current training program is in deep trouble, and Iraqi forces are far from being capable, committed, and effective. In too many cases, they cannot even defend themselves, and have fled at the first sign of battle.

It is not enough to tell us—as the Administration has—how many Iraqis go through training. The problem is not merely the numbers. The essential question is how many are prepared to give their lives if necessary, for a future of freedom for their country.

The insurgents have been skilled at recruiting Iraqis to participate in suicide attacks. But too often, the trained Iraqi forces do not have a comparable commitment to the Iraqi government. Recruits are ambivalent about America, unsure of the political transition, and skeptical about the credibility of their military and political institutions. The way to strengthen their allegiance is to give them a worthy cause to defend as soon as possible– a truly free, independent and sovereign Iraq.

We now have no choice but to make the best we can of the disaster we have created in Iraq. The current course is only making the crisis worse. We need to define our objective realistically and redefine both our political and our military presence.

President Bush has left us with few good choices. There are costs to staying, and costs to leaving. There may well be violence as we disengage militarily from Iraq and Iraq disengages politically from us. But there will be much more serious violence if we continue our present dangerous and reckless course. It will not be easy to extricate ourselves from Iraq, but we must begin.

Error is no excuse for its own perpetuation. Mindless determination doesn’t make a better outcome likely. Setting a firm strategy for withdrawal may not guarantee success, but not doing so will almost certainly guarantee failure. Casualties are increasing. America is tied down. Our military is stretched to the breaking point. Our capacity to respond to crises and threats elsewhere in the world has been compromised.

The book of Proverbs in the Bible teaches us that, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” It’s time for President Bush to swallow his pride and end our country’s continuing failures in Iraq and in the eyes of the world. When the President delivers the State of the Union Address next week, I hope he will demonstrate his intention to do that. The danger is very real that if he does not, our leadership in the world will be permanently lost. We cannot let that happen.

There is a wiser course we can take in keeping with the best in our heritage and history –a course that will help America, at long last, to regain our rightful place of respect in the world and bring our troops home with honor. Let’s take that course, and take it now.

Thank you very much.
-30-
Published on Saturday, January 22, 2005 by the Miami Herald (Florida)

Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home
by Howard Zinn

We must withdraw our military from Iraq, the sooner the better. The reason is simple: Our presence there is a disaster for the American people and an even bigger disaster for the Iraqi people.
It is a strange logic to declare, as so many in Washington do, that it was wrong for us to invade Iraq but right for us to remain. A recent New York Times editorial sums up the situation accurately: ``Some 21 months after the American invasion, United States military forces remain essentially alone in battling what seems to be a growing insurgency, with no clear prospect of decisive success any time in the foreseeable future.''
And then, in an extraordinary non sequitur: ``Given the lack of other countries willing to put up their hands as volunteers, the only answer seems to be more American troops, and not just through the spring, as currently planned. . . . Forces need to be expanded through stepped-up recruitment.''
Here is the flawed logic: We are alone in the world in this invasion. The insurgency is growing. There is no visible prospect of success. Therefore, let's send more troops? The definition of fanaticism is that when you discover that you are going in the wrong direction, you redouble your speed.
In all of this, there is an unexamined premise: that military victory would constitute ``success.''
Conceivably, the United States, possessed of enormous weaponry, might finally crush the resistance in Iraq. The cost would be great. Already, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have lost their lives (and we must not differentiate between ''their'' casualties and ''ours'' if we believe that all human beings have an equal right to life.) Would that be a ``success''?
In 1967, the same arguments that we are hearing now were being made against withdrawal in Vietnam. The United States did not pull out its troops for six more years. During that time, the war killed at least one million more Vietnamese and perhaps 30,000 U.S. military personnel.
We must stay in Iraq, it is said again and again, so that we can bring stability and democracy to that country. Isn't it clear that after almost two years of war and occupation we have brought only chaos, violence and death to that country, and not any recognizable democracy?
Can democracy be nurtured by destroying cities, by bombing, by driving people from their homes?
There is no certainty as to what would happen in our absence. But there is absolute certainty about the result of our presence -- escalating deaths on both sides.
The loss of life among Iraqi civilians is especially startling. The British medical journal Lancet reports that 100,000 civilians have died as a result of the war, many of them children. The casualty toll on the American side includes more than 1,350 deaths and thousands of maimed soldiers, some losing limbs, others blinded. And tens of thousands more are facing psychological damage in the aftermath.
Have we learned nothing from the history of imperial occupations, all pretending to help the people being occupied?
The United States, the latest of the great empires, is perhaps the most self-deluded, having forgotten that history, including our own: our 50-year occupation of the Philippines, or our long occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) or of the Dominican Republic (1916-1924), our military intervention in Southeast Asia and our repeated interventions in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.
Our military presence in Iraq is making us less safe, not more so. It is inflaming people in the Middle East, and thereby magnifying the danger of terrorism. Far from fighting ''there rather than here,'' as President Bush has claimed, the occupation increases the chance that enraged infiltrators will strike us here at home.
In leaving, we can improve the odds of peace and stability by encouraging an international team of negotiators, largely Arab, to mediate among the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds and work out a federalist compromise to give some autonomy to each group. We must not underestimate the capacity of the Iraqis, once free of both Saddam Hussein and the U.S. occupying army, to forge their own future.
But the first step is to support our troops in the only way that word support can have real meaning -- by saving their lives, their limbs, their sanity. By bringing them home.
Howard Zinn is author of the best-selling A People's History of the United States.
© 2005 Miami Herald
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Wounded in action

Haunted by his experiences as an army medic in Iraq, David McGough couldn't cope with life after his tour of duty. Yet it took two failed suicide attempts before he was diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Alison Roberts on the forgotten casualties of the war

Friday February 4, 2005
The Guardian

The first symptom was sleeplessness. It was July 2003 and Lance Corporal David McGough of the Royal Army Medical Corps was just back from a five-month tour of duty in Basra, Iraq. Lots of the lads from his unit had trouble settling back to a normal routine at first, but most were OK within a fortnight or so. David, however, did not sleep for an entire month.
"My body just wouldn't switch off," he tells me, fidgeting with his hands. "All the time this tension was building, this incredibly tense restlessness. I was going for weeks without any sleep at all and then collapsing, sleeping for maybe six hours, and then starting all over again." At night, on leave, he walked around his small maisonette in a suburb of Preston, Lancashire, folding and re-folding his clothes, checking and double-checking the locks, looking over his shoulder repeatedly for imagined intruders.
McGough was vomiting every day, often bloodily. The odour of cooking or burned meat made him sick, though "the worst thing is the smell of public toilets". "That brings the PoW camps back. The stench of those places was horrendous."
Mostly it was the insomnia that started to drive him mad, that made him crash his car and almost beat his then-fiancee, that both masked and exacerbated his chronic underlying depression. The army doctor at the camp in Preston prescribed him Prozac and more or less told him to pull himself together. When Prozac failed to work, McGough was given a stronger antidepressant, citalopram, "but no sleeping tablets, and by then - Christmas - I wasn't really sleeping at all".
McGough's two attempts at suicide, both at Christmas in 2003, were more cries for help than committed bids to kill himself. On the first occasion he held a knife across his throat until his sister begged him to put it down, and on the second he put a 9mm pistol to his head but did not pull the trigger fully. Horrified by what was happening, McGough's father, a civil servant based in Northern Ireland, called Dr Alun Jones, a civilian psychiatrist who specialises in diagnosing and treating psychological problems in servicemen and women. "It was immediately clear," says Jones, "that McGough was suffering a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder."
So far, PTSD experts have seen a mere handful of British sufferers from this latest war in Iraq - but as the violence goes on, the trickle is expected to become a flood. Late last year, the independent inquiry into Gulf war illnesses chaired by Lord Lloyd of Berwick came to the conclusion that there was "every reason" to accept the existence of a Gulf war syndrome, and that post-traumatic stress was one of several contributing factors. Though the Ministry of Defence does not publish statistical predictions, military psychiatrists in America have been warned to expect psychiatric disorder to occur in a remarkable 20% of servicemen and women returning from Iraq.
"What we've got now is a situation starting to approximate to Northern Ireland or Bosnia, to civil insurrection rather than a straight shooting war," says Jones, who runs PTSD clinics around the country and at a residential centre in north Wales."In those kinds of circumstances, where you're experiencing hatred and violence from an unpredictable civilian population, we tend to get a lot of very disturbed and damaged soldiers." In the field of trauma studies, this atmosphere of constant and random danger is known by the shorthand "no safe place".
Other surveys suggest that roughly half the servicemen who suffer psychiatric illness as a result of traumatic events do not seek medical help, or do so years later, when the psychological afterburn has irreparably damaged marriages, careers and mental wellbeing. "And there's still a stigma attached," says Leigh Skelton, director of clinical services at Combat Stress, the ex-services mental welfare charity. "PTSD is seen as a career-stopper within the army. Generally, the first line of action servicemen and women take is to bottle it up. Then they'll self-medicate, usually with alcohol, sometimes with other substances. Cries for help often come from relatives rather than from the affected person."
Symptoms range from insomnia, nausea and extreme fatigue to the classic "flashback"; aggression, feelings of alienation and irrational anger. Sometimes the disorder centres on one particular memory. A 30-year-old female ambulance driver in the Territorial Army, for example, constantly replays the moment her vehicle was blown up last year by a hand-made bomb tied to a lamp-post in Basra. One marine in his early 20s now suffering chronic PTSD remembers "the fear in the eyes of an Iraqi soldier in the window" of a building mortared by the British; and seeing that fear again when British soldiers mistakenly opened fire on a civilian vehicle.
McGough, however, identified no single trigger. Skinny and pale, when I met him in late November he was a shadow of the strong young man he was pre-Iraq - the high-flyer who studied psychology at Queen's College, Belfast, who loved to sky-dive and socialise, who was promoted within a year of joining the RAMC. For him, the pressure began the moment he and his medical unit moved into Iraq, at 2.30am on the first night of the war, four hours after the Americans began their aerial bombardment of Baghdad.
McGough was 21 years old and effectively in charge of 80 rookie soldiers fresh out of training, most of them still teenagers. As medics, they travelled in canvas-roofed trucks and were not equipped with body armour. "There was gunfire everywhere. Some of them were literally crapping themselves in the back of those trucks." That first night, there wasn't even time to pitch camp. "The worst casualty I saw was an Iraqi guy hit about 13 times, big chunks of his stomach, face and legs just gone. We intubated him and opened him up by the side of a truck. You do it on autopilot at the time because your training kicks in. It's only afterwards you start to think about what you've seen and done."
The mobile field unit, the first line of medical services, was initially established just south of Basra, but was twice relocated to escape attack. Its job was to mop up trauma cases, stabilise them and send them to field hospitals nearer the southern border. According to McGough, the medical unit received up to 1,000 wounded Iraqis during his five-and-a-half-month tour of duty, of whom perhaps 60% died and were buried in mass graves.
A large proportion of the medics' work, however, took place in the PoW camps set up on each site. "Usually we had about 150 prisoners coming in a day," says McGough, "both soldiers and civilians who'd been picked up with guns. Some had clearly been tortured by the Iraqi regime. There was one man who had thick black stuff, like goo, coming out of his penis, and said he'd been injected with something when he was a prisoner before. Others had quite infected lash wounds on their backs, or broken jaw bones." The unit also saw a number of raped women, who were treated and counselled by a female army gynaecologist.
Seemingly futile or absurd situations are known to compound wartime trauma. The unit's first location at Basra was regularly attacked by Iraqis defending a nearby ammunition dump from a maze-like system of trenches. "There was no adherence to any kind of convention on their part. Sometimes it was ridiculous. Every time we hit and wounded someone, a white flag would go up on their side and the others would bring the man we'd wounded over to the base for treatment. Then they'd go back up and start shooting at us again."
Most harrowing of all was the discovery of the corpse of a 12-year-old girl who'd been hanged in a backstreet alley in Basra. McGough was sent to confirm the death and recognised her as the child to whom he and his comrades had chatted the week before. "We heard later that she was probably hanged by the crowd because she'd been talking to our crew ... That was one of the worst things. You expect to see some nasty stuff, but seeing a little girl hanging in the street because she once spoke to you ... "
PTSD has been a recognised injury of war for more than 30 years, yet treatment in Britain is still very patchy. It took complete break-down ("my girlfriend found me one night huddled on the floor, shaking and crying") and several emergency trips to hospital in Preston before McGough was finally prescribed sleeping tablets. While a member of the British army, he was unable to access the civilian care system - and had been informed of a decision to discharge him without a pension.
"The army is not a branch of the social services," says Jones, "but I do think there is a certain duty of care, knowing what we now know about the effects of trauma. It would be reasonable to expect the army to check these lads over for psychological injury when they come back from combat, but in fact there is no obligation whatsoever to do this."
"No one rings or visits in the mornings because I'm just a horrible, nasty person before the drugs have kicked in," says McGough. He was increasingly convinced that his physical symptoms - the vomiting and chronic weight loss - are related to anthrax injections and to the Naps tablets taken to counter the potential use of enemy nerve agents. On bad days he does not get out of bed at all.
"I loved being in the army," he says. "It was supposed to be my long-term career, and I was prepared to give everything to it ... I just wish I could shake this and get on with my life again."


http://society.guardian.co.uk/mentalhealth/story/0,8150,1405859,00.html

Posted by richard at February 17, 2005 06:13 AM