History > 2007 > USA > War > Iraq (VI)

In Report to Congress,

Oversight Officials

Say Iraqi Rebuilding

Falls Short of Goals

October 31, 2007
The New York Times
By JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD, Oct. 30 — More than $100 billion has been devoted to rebuilding Iraq, mainly thanks to American taxpayers and Iraqi oil revenues, but nearly five years into the conflict, output in critical areas like water and electricity remain below United States goals, federal oversight officials reported to Congress on Tuesday.

After the influx of that much cash into Iraq’s infrastructure, there are also some hopeful signs, said one of those officials, Stuart W. Bowen Jr., who heads the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The amount of electricity on Iraq’s national grid, while still well below expectations, has made modest gains recently on the strength of some new generators and improved security.

But another oversight official, Joseph A. Christoff, the director of international affairs and trade at the Government Accountability Office, said some measures of what some see as progress in Iraq were not as clear-cut as they might seem.

For example, Pentagon statistics indicated that a drop in violence in Iraq over the past several months “was primarily due to a decrease in attacks against coalition forces,” Mr. Christoff said in written remarks to a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee.

“Attacks against Iraqi security forces and civilians have declined less than attacks against coalition forces,” Mr. Christoff wrote.

Mr. Bowen’s testimony, before the same committee, showed that some of the same disastrous failures that have repeatedly damaged the reconstruction program are still occurring. A project to fix a dangerously flawed dam on the Tigris River at the northern city of Mosul has cost at least $27 million and achieved essentially nothing of practical value, his testimony and two related reports by his office found.

Oversight of the dam project by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which had responsibility, was so weak that a contractor hired to build a giant production facility to seal leaks in the soil did the improbable, to say the least: the contractor undertook to build a different kind of facility, which could not seal the leaks.

The Army Corps and its designated oversight personnel apparently did not notice the discrepancy, Mr. Bowen’s office found. Problems with the dam are so severe that in a letter included in one of the reports, Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander there, warned that the dam could collapse and unleash a giant flood onto the northern city of Mosul.

Mr. Bowen said in an interview that even with the waste of so much of the $100 billion, there was probably no other choice after the 2003 invasion but to spend it.

“I think it was necessary given the severely debilitated condition of Iraq’s infrastructure,” Mr. Bowen said. “It could have been spent better on all fronts,” he said.

American funds devoted to reconstruction have come to about $45 billion, compared to about $40 billion from Iraq. The rest are international pledges, only a few billion of which have actually been spent.

Among the major expenditures on the American side is what the accountability office estimates to be $19 billion to train and equip Iraqi security forces and $7 billion to rehabilitate the country’s oil and electricity sectors. Even so, despite endless American press releases on Iraqi forces taking over responsibility for parts of the country, the office estimates that just 10 of 140 Iraqi Army, national police and special operations units were in fact operating independently as of September.

The Mosul dam, the largest in the country, was built under Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. It was built on porous and water-soluble soil. So huge cavities continually form beneath the dam, threatening it with collapse.

Iraqi engineers, who are often improvisers on a grand scale, have long dealt with the problem by regularly drilling down to the cavities and filling them with large amounts of grout, a sealing agent. As part of its own solution, the United States awarded contracts to several firms to build five giant new grout-mixing plants around the dam.

But for whatever reason, the contractors built cement-mixing plants instead and even those have never worked, Mr. Bowen’s office found. To make the case still more puzzling, the contractors’ drawings plainly showed that they had the wrong type of plant in mind before the work even started.

One result was essentially nothing besides some shoddily built storage silos and other idle equipment, the office found.

“The Iraqis are facing a very serious problem,” said Ginger Cruz, a deputy inspector general in the office. “The United States tried to do a little bit to help them out, and so far we’ve been completely unsuccessful.”

In Report to Congress, Oversight Officials Say Iraqi Rebuilding Falls Short of Goals, NYT, 31.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/world/middleeast/31reconstruct.html

Thousands Call for Swift End to Iraq War

October 28, 2007
Filed at 7:31 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Thousands of people called for a swift end to the war in Iraq as they marched through downtown on Saturday, chanting and carrying signs that read: ''Wall Street Gets Rich, Iraqis and GIs Die'' or ''Drop Tuition Not Bombs.''

The streets were filled with thousands as labor union members, anti-war activists, clergy and others rallied near City Hall before marching to Dolores Park.

As part of the demonstration, protesters fell on Market Street as part of a ''die in'' to commemorate the thousands of American soldiers and Iraqi citizens who have died since the conflict began in March 2003.

The protest was the largest in a series of war protests taking place in New York, Los Angeles and other U.S. cities, organizers said.

No official head count was available. Organizers of the event estimated about 30,000 people participated in San Francisco. It appeared that more than 10,000 people attended the march.

''I got the sense that many people were at a demonstration for the first time,'' said Sarah Sloan, one of the event's organizers. ''That's something that's really changed. People have realized the right thing to do is to take to the streets.''

In the shadow of the National Constitution Center and Independence Hall in Philadelphia, a few hundred protesters ranging from grade school-aged children to senior citizens called on President Bush to end funding for the war and bring troops home.

Marchers who braved severe wet weather during the walk of more than 30 blocks were met by people lining the sidewalks and clutching a long yellow ribbon over the final blocks before Independence Mall. There, the rally opened with songs and prayers by descendants of Lenape Indians.

''Our signs are limp from the rain and the ground is soggy, but out spirits are high,'' said Bal Pinguel, of the American Friends Service Committee, one of the national sponsors of the event. ''The high price we are paying is the more than 3,800 troops who have been killed in the war in Iraq.''

Vince Robbins, 51, of Mount Holly, N.J., said there needed to be more rallies and more outrage.

''Where's the outcry? Where's the horror that almost 4,000 Americans have died in a foreign country that we invaded?'' Robbins said. ''I'm almost as angry at the American people as I am the president. I think Americans have become apathetic and placid about the whole thing.''

In New York, among the thousands marching down Broadway was a man carrying cardboard peace doves. Some others dressed as prisoners, wearing the bright orange garb of Guantanamo Bay inmates and pushing a person in a cage.

Chicago police said about 5,000 people marched through city streets to protest the war.

Police spokeswoman JoAnn Taylor said three protesters were arrested before the march started. They face charges including resisting arrest, failure to obey a police officer, criminal damage to property and aggravated battery to a police officer.

In Seattle, thousands of marchers were led by a small group of Iraq war veterans.

At Occidental Park, where the protesters rallied after the march, the American Friends Service Committee displayed scores of combat boots, one pair for each U.S. solider killed in Iraq.

------

Associated Press writer Bob Lentz in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

    Thousands Call for Swift End to Iraq War, NYT, 28.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Iraq-War-Protest.html

State Department Security Chief Resigns

October 24, 2007
Filed at 1:40 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The State Department's security chief announced his resignation on Wednesday in the wake of last month's deadly Blackwater USA shooting incident in Baghdad and growing questions about the use of private contractors in Iraq.

Richard Griffin, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, announced his decision to resign at a weekly staff meeting, according to an internal informational e-mail sent to colleagues.

''He read his letter of resignation at the weekly Diplomatic Security staff meeting,'' said the e-mail, which was read to The Associated Press by one its recipients. ''There was no detailed reason provided and no effective date identified at this time.''

Neither Griffin nor spokesmen for the department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security could be reached for immediate comment.

Griffin announced his resignation just a day after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered a series of measures to boost government oversight of the private guards the department uses to protect its diplomats in Iraq.

The steps were recommended by a review panel Rice created after a Sept. 16 incident in which Blackwater personnel are accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians. The panel found serious lapses in the department's oversight of such guards, who are employed by Griffin's bureau.

Arguments on Capitol Hill over the role of private contractors in wartorn Iraq have largely obscured the broader debate over the war in recent weeks as majority Democrats have scrambled for new strategies designed to end the U.S. presence there.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The State Department's security chief announced his resignation on Wednesday in the wake of last month's deadly Blackwater USA shooting incident in Baghdad and growing questions about the use of private contractors in Iraq.

Richard Griffin, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, announced his decision to resign at a weekly staff meeting, according to an internal informational e-mail sent to colleagues.

''He read his letter of resignation at the weekly Diplomatic Security staff meeting,'' said the e-mail, which was read to The Associated Press by one its recipients. ''There was no detailed reason provided and no effective date identified at this time.''

    State Department Security Chief Resigns, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq-Blackwater.html

Trillion-dollar war: Afghanistan and Iraq set to cost more than Vietnam and Korea
 

Published: 24 October 2007
The Independent
By Leonard Doyle in Washington
 

President George Bush will have spent more than $1 trillion on military adventures by the time he leaves office at the end of next year, more than the entire amount spent on the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.

There are also disturbing signs that Mr Bush is preparing an attack on Iran during his remaining months in office. He has demanded $46bn (£22.5bn) emergency funds from Congress by Christmas and included with it a single sentence requesting money to upgrade the B-2 "stealth" bomber.

By wrapping his request in the flag of patriotism, the President has made it very difficult even for an anti-war Congress to refuse the money. He was accompanied by the family of a dead US marine when he made the request for funds on Monday.

The House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has attacked the President's priorities saying: "For the cost of less than 40 days in Iraq, we could provide health care coverage to 10 million children for an entire year."

"The President is happy to put the military spending on the national credit card," said Steve Kosiak, a vice-president of the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent, military policy research institute, who said that the $1trn figure will soon be passed.

The full amount requested for this fiscal year is now $196.4bn. The US is on course to spend a total of $806bn fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than on any war it has fought since the Second World War. With interest payments this tops $1trn.

Despite their expense, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are less of an economic burden (at 4.2 per cent of GDP) than earlier wars. The 1990-91 Gulf War cost $88bn, the Korean War cost $456bn (12.2 per cent of GDP) and the Vietnam War, $518bn (9.4 per cent of GDP). By comparison the Second World War cost more than 40 per cent of GDP.

Mr Kosiak also points out that the military is using the cover of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to get funding for all sorts of projects. The upgrade of the stealth bomber is one of those projects.

The Pentagon wants to upgrade its fleet of stealth bombers so that they can deliver 30-tonne, satellite-guided bombs. The planes would be based on the British Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia where hangars are being specially upgraded. These "bunker-buster" bombs are six times bigger than anything used by the air force and designed to destroy weapons of mass destruction facilities underground. Diego Garcia is also much closer to Iran than Missouri, where the bombers are based.

This weekend Vice-President Dick Cheney stepped up the rhetoric, warning of "serious consequences" if Iran refuses to stop enriching uranium and said the US would not permit it to get nuclear weapons. Iran denies that the enrichment is linked to a nuclear weapons programme and says it is entirely peaceful.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, who was in Washington for talks with the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, yesterday would not be drawn on Mr Cheney's remarks.

Mr Bush's request for an extra $46bn in funds by Christmas has angered Congress, but it is expected to be approved.

This year's request for extra military spending is already the largest since 11 September 2001 and rising fast.

The lion's share of the money Mr Bush has asked for is for the Pentagon. Some has also been earmarked for UN peacekeeping in Darfur, emergency food aid in Africa and sending oil to North Korea as part of a deal to end its nuclear weapons programme.

* The US State Department has been harshly criticised for failing to oversee the private security companies it relies on in Iraq.

An internal review found poor supervision and accountability for companies such as Blackwater USA as well as DynCorp.

An audit of DynCorp says its record keeping is so poor that the State Department cannot account for $1.2bn (£590m) it paid the company since 2004 to train Iraqi police officers.

    Trillion-dollar war: Afghanistan and Iraq set to cost more than Vietnam and Korea, I, 24.10.2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article3090340.ece

Iraq and Afghanistan wars may total $2.4 trillion



23 October 2007
USA Today
By Ken Dilanian

WASHINGTON — The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could total $2.4 trillion through the next decade, or nearly $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate scheduled for release today.

A previous CBO estimate put the wars' costs at more than $1.6 trillion. This one adds $705 billion in interest, taking into account that the conflicts are being funded with borrowed money.

The new estimate also includes President Bush's request Monday for another $46 billion in war funding, said Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., budget committee chairman, who provided the CBO's new numbers to USA TODAY.

Assuming that Iraq accounts for about 80% of that total, the Iraq war would cost $1.9 trillion, including $564 million in interest, said Thomas Kahn, Spratt's staff director. The committee holds a hearing on war costs this morning.

"The number is so big, it boggles the mind," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill.

Sean Kevelighan, a spokesman for the White House budget office, said, "Congress should stop playing politics with our troops by trying to artificially inflate war funding levels." He declined to provide a White House estimate.

The CBO estimates assume that 75,000 troops will remain in both countries through 2017, including roughly 50,000 in Iraq. That is a "very speculative" projection, though it's not entirely unreasonable, said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the non-partisan Lexington Institute.

As of Sept. 30, the two wars have cost $604 billion, the CBO says. Adjusted for inflation, that is higher than the costs of the Korea and Vietnam conflicts, according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Defense spending during those two wars accounted for a far larger share of the American economy.

In the months before the March 2003 Iraq invasion, the Bush administration estimated the Iraq war would cost no more than $50 billion.

    Iraq and Afghanistan wars may total $2.4 trillion, UT, 23.10.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2007-10-23-wacosts_N.htm

Editorial

Even Closer to the Brink

October 23, 2007
The New York Times

The news out of Iraq just keeps getting worse. Now Turkey is threatening to send troops across the border to wipe out Kurdish rebel bases, after guerrillas killed at least a dozen Turkish soldiers. This latest crisis should have come as no surprise. But it is one more widely predicted problem the Bush administration failed to plan for before its misguided invasion — and one more problem it urgently needs to deal with as part of a swift and orderly exit from Iraq.

Turkey’s anger is understandable. Guerrillas from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the P.K.K., have been striking from bases in Iraqi Kurdistan with growing impunity and effect, using plastic explosives, mines and arms that are far too readily accessible in Iraq. The death toll for Turkish military forces is mounting.

Turkey’s civilian leaders are feeling strong popular pressure to lash back. The leadership should realize that the conflict is providing a dangerous opening for Turkey’s generals. The military is determined to regain the upper hand over Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom they detest for his party’s roots in Islamic politics.

Ankara needs to know that an invasion would not only add to Iraq’s chaos and raise the specter of a regional war, it would also do major damage to Turkey’s international standing and finish off its prospects for joining the European Union.

Following a personal appeal from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Erdogan’s government delayed retaliating and announced that all political means would be tried before launching a military operation into Iraq. But there is not a lot of time.

Washington should also explain the dangerous facts of life to the leaders of Iraqi Kurdistan, who have done nothing to rein in the guerrillas or drive them out of their territory. Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, who is a Kurd, did no good Sunday when he first said he wanted “to solve problems peacefully,” but then declared that Iraq would not even turn over “a Kurdish cat” to Turkey.

The Kurds will find it much easier to prosper if they can live in peace with Turkey, whose businessmen already invest heavily in their region. And Mr. Talabani and other Iraqi Kurds need to understand that their enclave of comparative peace and prosperity will not survive a regional war.

Washington must now try to walk both sides back from this brink. It then should make a serious and sustained effort to broker a long-overdue political agreement between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. There is much distrust on both sides. But there is also a lot to talk about. Iraqi Kurds want access routes to sell goods to Europe. Turkey needs a secure border with Iraq.

With so many other problems in Iraq, the Bush administration apparently thought it could ignore this one. It can’t. If it doesn’t now move quickly, Iraq’s disastrous civil war could spiral into an even bigger disaster — a regional war.

    Even Closer to the Brink, NYT, 23.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/opinion/23tue1.html

Nearly 4.5 Million Iraqis Displaced

October 23, 2007
Filed at 12:01 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

GENEVA (AP) -- At least 1,000 Iraqis are fleeing their homes each day because of violence and insecurity -- a figure that could increase with threats of cross-border attacks into northern Iraq, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday.

Nearly 4.5 million Iraqis have fled the country or have been displaced inside Iraq, said the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

The estimates -- 2.2 million refugees in neighboring countries, mostly Jordan and Syria, and about 2.3 million internally displaced -- are slightly higher than figures released last month by the agency and suggest that a recent decline in major insurgent attacks across Iraq has not slowed the flow of people seeking safer havens.

''Displacement (within the country) has been ongoing at a rate of 1,000 to 2,000 a day,'' UNHCR spokeswoman Astrid van Genderen Stort told The Associated Press.

More than 800,000 Iraqis have sought shelter in the northern Kurdish region, which has been mostly spared widespread violence since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. But concerns are growing about a possible new refugee crisis.

Turkey has massed military forces along its border with Iraq, threatening a cross-border offensive against hideouts used by Kurdish rebels seeking autonomy in southeast Turkey. Iran, meanwhile, has shelled border zones in Iraq used by Kurdish guerrillas opposing Tehran's Islamic regime.

''UNHCR is worried about ongoing instability that could lead to further displacement,'' said a statement from the agency.

    Nearly 4.5 Million Iraqis Displaced, NYT, 23.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-UN-Iraq-Refugees.html

Bin Laden Asks Iraq Insurgents to Unite

October 22, 2007
Filed at 2:18 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Osama bin Laden called for insurgents in Iraq to unite and avoid divisions, saying in an audiotape aired Monday that Muslims were ''waiting for you to gather under one banner.''

The authenticity of the tape aired on Al-Jazeera television could not be immediately confirmed, but the voice resembled that of bin Laden in previous messages. Al-Jazeera did not say how it obtained the tape of the al-Qaida leader.

''Some of you have been lax in one duty, which is to unite your ranks,'' bin Laden said. ''Beware of division ... The Muslim world is waiting for you to gather under one banner.''

    Bin Laden Asks Iraq Insurgents to Unite, NYT, 22.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Bin-Laden-Tape.html

Bush Wants $46 Billion More for Wars

October 22, 2007
Filed at 12:48 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush will ask Congress for another $46 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and finance other national security needs, The Associated Press has learned.

The figure, which Bush was expected to announce later Monday at the White House, brings to $196.4 billion the total requested by the administration for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere for the budget year that started Oct. 1. It includes $189.3 billion for the Defense Department, $6.9 billion for the State Department and $200 million for other agencies.

The figures were disclosed by congressional officials briefed on the request and who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement had not yet been made.

To date, Congress has already provided more than $455 billion for the Iraq war, with stepped-up military operations running about $12 billion a month. The war has claimed the lives of more than 3,830 members of the U.S. military and more than 73,000 Iraqi civilians.

The White House originally asked for $141.7 billion for the Pentagon to prosecute the Iraq and Afghanistan missions and asked for $5.3 billion more in July. The latest request includes $42.3 billion more for the Pentagon -- already revealed in summary last month -- and is accompanied by a modified State Department request bringing that agency's total for the 2008 budget year to almost $7 billion.

The State Department is requesting $550 million to combat drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America, $375 million for the West Bank and Gaza and $239 million for diplomatic costs in Iraq.

Top House lawmakers have already announced that they do not plan to act on Bush's request until next year, though they anticipate providing interim funds when completing a separate defense funding bill this fall.

Congress already has approved more than $5 billion for new vehicles whose V-shaped undercarriages provide much better protection against mines and roadside bombs. It's likely that Congress will quickly grant $11 billion more to deliver more than 7,000 of the vehicles.

The delays in submitting the remaining war funding request were in part due to unease among congressional Republicans about receiving it during the veto override battle involving a popular bill reauthorizing a children's health insurance program.

The request also includes $724 million for U.N. peacekeeping efforts in the war-torn Darfur region in Sudan, $106 million in fuel oil or comparable assistance to North Korea as a reward for the rogue nation's promises to cease its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Another $350 million would go to fight famine in Africa.

------

Associated Press writer Deb Riechmann contributed to this report in Washington.

    Bush Wants $46 Billion More for Wars, NYT, 22.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-War-Spending.html

U.S. Says Iraq Raid Kills 49 Militants

October 21, 2007
Filed at 11:36 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- U.S. forces backed by airstrikes raided Sadr City, Baghdad's main Shiite district, killing 49 militants on Sunday as they targeted a militia leader accused in high-profile kidnappings, the military said. Iraqi officials said women and children were among the dead.

The Iraqi reports followed other recent claims of civilian deaths as a result of U.S. military action or shootings by private Western security teams protecting American diplomats and aid groups. The military said it was not know of any civilians killed.

Tensions also rose in northern Iraq after separatist Kurdish rebels ambushed a military unit near Turkey's border with Iraq, killing at least 12 soldiers. Turkey's government has threatened to take action against the rebels based in northern Iraq if the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq does not stop the Kurdish attacks on Turkish forces.

Hours after the ambush, an Iraqi army officer from the border guard forces, Col. Hussein Rashid, said Turkish forces fired about 15 artillery shells toward Kurdish villages in the border area in northern Iraq. But there were no casualties.

In Sadr City, the U.S. military said ''an estimated 49 criminals'' were killed in three separate engagements during a raid targeting a suspected rogue Shiite militia leader specializing in kidnapping operations for which he sought funding from Iran.

U.S. troops returned fire after coming under sustained attack from automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades from nearby buildings as they began to raid a series of buildings in the district, according to a statement, which added that some 33 militants were killed in the firefight. Ground forces then called in airstrikes, which killed some six militants.

The U.S. troops were then attacked by a roadside bomb and continued heavy fire as they left the area, killing another 10 combatants in subsequent clashes.

''All total, coalition forces estimate that 49 criminals were killed in three separate engagements during this operation. Ground forces reported they were unaware of any innocent civilians being killed as a result of this operation,'' the military said in the updated statement.

Iraqi police and hospital officials put the death toll at at least 13 and said a woman and three children were among the dead from the pre-dawn raid in the sprawling district. They said 52 people were injured.

Associated Press photos showed the bodies of two toddlers, one with a gouged face, swaddled in blankets on the floor of the morgue. Relatives said they were killed when helicopter gunfire hit their house as they slept. Their shirts were pulled up, exposing their abdomens. A diaper showed above the waistband of the shorts of one of the boys.

Several houses, cars and shops were damaged in the fighting, which witnesses said lasted two hours.

Iraqis have routinely claimed civilians were killed as U.S.-led forces stepped up raids to try to root out extremists in Sadr City and other Shiite strongholds as part of an 8-month-old security operation to quell sectarian violence.

But the reported death toll in Sunday's strike was among the largest.

On Aug. 8, the U.S. military said 32 suspected militants were killed and 12 captured in an operation targeting a ring believed to be smuggling armor-piercing roadside bombs from Iran. Iraqi police and witnesses claimed nine civilians, including two women, were killed in that raid.

The sweeps into Sadr City have sent a strong message that U.S. forces plan no letup on suspected Shiite militia cells despite risks of upsetting the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and its efforts at closer cooperation with Shiite heavyweight Iran.

An Iraqi military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, said the government would ask the military for an explanation about Sunday's raid and stressed the need to avoid civilian deaths everywhere.

The government has had mixed reactions to the raids and airstrikes, particularly when they target Sunni extremists.

U.S. troops backed by attack aircraft also killed 19 suspected insurgents and 15 civilians, including nine children, in an operation Oct. 11 targeting al-Qaida in Iraq leaders northwest of Baghdad.

In that case, al-Maliki's government said the killings of the 15 women and children were a ''sorrowful matter,'' but added that civilian deaths are unavoidable in the fight against al-Qaida.

Relatives gathered at Sadr City's Imam Ali hospital as the emergency room was overwhelmed with bloodied victims and the dead were placed in caskets covered by Iraqi flags.

An initial military statement e-mailed to The Associated Press said the raids were targeting ''criminals believed to be responsible for the kidnapping of coalition soldiers in November 2006 and May 2007.''

However a later release said only that U.S. troops, acting on intelligence, raided a number of buildings in an operation targeting a rogue Shiite militia leader specializing in Iranian-funded kidnappings.

The military said it was targeting a member of a breakaway faction of the Mahdi Army militia that is nominally loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. The anti-American cleric has called on his fighters to stand down.

At the Imam Ali hospital, a local resident who goes by the name Abu Fatmah said his neighbor's 14-year-old son, Saif Alwan, was killed while sleeping on the roof. Fatmah said many of the casualties were people sleeping on the roof to seek relief from the hot weather and lack of electricity.

''Saif was killed by an airstrike and what is his guilt? Is he from the Mahdi Army? He is a poor student,'' Abu Fatmah said.

An uncle of 2-year-old Ali Hamid said the boy was killed and his parents seriously wounded when heavy gunfire from a helicopter struck the wall and windows of their house as they slept indoors.

APTN video showed a U.S. helicopter flying over the area while black smoke rose into the sky.

Other footage showed three bloodied boys sitting on hospital tables and an elderly man being treated for a head wound.

Mourners tied wooden coffins onto the tops of minivans with the plume of smoking rising in the background.

    U.S. Says Iraq Raid Kills 49 Militants, NYT, 21.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html?hp

Old Enough Now to Ask How Dad Died at War

October 21, 2007
The New York Times
By LISA W. FODERARO

LANCASTER, N.Y. — CamerynLee was only 3 years old when her father, Lance Cpl. Eric J. Orlowski, a Marine Corps reservist, was killed in an accidental shooting during the first days of the Iraq war. Now 8, she is suddenly hungry for information about the man she remembers only in sketchy vignettes: Did he like chicken wings as much as she does? How about hockey? Was he funny?

“When it happened, I don’t think she fully understood,” said her mother, Nicole Kross, 29. “At that age she really didn’t ask too many questions. It’s all coming out more now.”

In a grim marker of the longevity of the war, children who were infants or toddlers when they lost a parent in action are growing up. In the process, they are coming to grips with death in new, more mature and at times more painful ways — pondering a parent they barely knew, asking pointed questions about the circumstances of the death and experiencing a kind of delayed grief.

Families and bereavement counselors say that media coverage of the war, dedication ceremonies and even school events — in which most classmates have both parents in attendance — can all heighten yearning for the missing parent. For young children, the flood of prickly feelings and questions often arises just as the surviving parent is moving beyond his or her own intense grief, sometimes with a new spouse or partner in the picture.

“As 3-year-olds, they have a pragmatic, concrete concept,” said Joanne M. Steen, co-author of “Military Widow: A Survival Guide.” “They’ll say matter-of-factly, ‘My daddy died.’ But at significant points in their lives, they go back and revisit this, and it’s really hard on the surviving spouse. They end up telling the story over and over again of how Daddy died at each stage.”

Nevertheless, many parents work hard to keep the memory of the dead parent alive for their children. CamerynLee and her mother, sitting in their sunny kitchen in this middle-class town outside Buffalo recently, looked at pictures of Lance Corporal Orlowski, along with letters of condolence from President Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Outside, the Marine Corps flag was flying near a Halloween scarecrow.

Ms. Kross also showed her daughter a letter that her father wrote from Kuwait City, which began, “What’s up ladies?” He ended it by telling CamerynLee to be a “good girl for Mommy” and urging Nicole, a former Air Force reservist, to “take care of yourself.”

It was the first time that Ms. Kross had shown the letter to CamerynLee, a sprite of a girl with a gentle voice and large blue eyes. “I think about him every day,” CamerynLee said as she studied the letter. “I remember cooking with him. He was helping me flip the sausages. I remember him carrying me. I wish he was still alive.”

In some cases, involving children who were very young or not even born when their mothers or fathers died, the surviving parents attempt to create memories.

Brandy Williams, of Waipahu, Hawaii, had a 3-year-old daughter at home and another on the way when her husband, Sgt. Eugene Williams of Highland, N.Y., was killed by a car bomb in March 2003.

Mrs. Williams has three videos of her husband, who was usually the one behind the camera, and the girls, Mya, now 8, and Monica, 4, have watched them over and over. In one, the couple is coming home from the hospital with Mya after her birth. “Monica thinks it’s her, and it’s so hard because she doesn’t understand,” Mrs. Williams said.

There is also a table in the living room displaying his Army beret and pictures of him, smiling.

“My worst fear is that they’ll forget about him,” Mrs. Williams said.

Like CamerynLee, Mya clings to fleeting images of her father: frolicking with him on a playground at Fort Stewart in Georgia, being given toys. At first, Mya’s understanding of her father’s death was appropriately simplistic, filtered through a child’s universe.

“When I told her that Daddy’s in the sky with the angels, she said, ‘Like the Care Bears?’ ” recalled Mrs. Williams, referring to the popular line of rainbow-climbing bears. “So for a while we would say, ‘Daddy’s in heaven with the Care Bears.’ ”

But after attending a grief camp run by a nonprofit organization, the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, or TAPS, 6-year-old Mya asked her mother exactly how her father had died. They were sitting in the car in a supermarket parking lot, and Mrs. Williams told her as calmly as she could about the checkpoint and the bad person who pulled up in a car and the bomb that exploded.

“I’m looking at her through the rearview mirror, and I saw her eyes get really big and it was heart-wrenching,” Mrs. Williams recalled. “At the grief camp, she heard about I.E.D.’s and roadside bombs and hearing how her daddy died was hard for her to take. The rest of the day she was withdrawn and quiet and said she didn’t want to hear anything else. I started freaking out: did I do the right thing?”

TAPS, a Washington-based organization that helps military families cope with grief and trauma, estimates that at least 2,000 children under age 18 have lost a parent in the war in Iraq. It is unclear, however, how many of those children were toddlers or infants when the death occurred.

Grief counselors and sociologists who study military families say that children, and the surviving spouses, need a strong network of support after a member of the military dies, especially since many abruptly leave the cocoonlike environment of a military base.

“This goes back to the old axiom that if you don’t take care of the mother, she can’t take care of the child,” said James A. Martin, a retired Army colonel and associate professor in the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research at Bryn Mawr College.

“In that kind of trauma, it’s really what the extended family and community and organizations can do to reach out and provide comfort to assist the primary caregiver,” he said. “The younger the children, the more likely that kind of support is needed.”

The burst of initial support is not always sustained, however. Brandy Sacco, a 26-year-old nursing student, lost her husband, Sgt. Dominic J. Sacco of Albany, two years ago when insurgents fired on his tank. Mrs. Sacco was left with two young children: Anthony, then 3 months, and 4-year-old Elyssa Armstrong. (Elyssa is Mrs. Sacco’s daughter from a previous relationship, but Sergeant Sacco, his wife said, cared for her as if she were his own child.)

“I had people come visit me the first month,” said Mrs. Sacco, who lives in Topeka, Kan. “They brought me food, and then everybody was gone. I was like, O.K., what do I do now?”

For Elyssa, who is now 6, the anguish of losing her stepfather in the war resurfaced last summer when a new softball complex was dedicated in his memory at nearby Fort Riley. Sergeant Sacco’s parents flew in for the event, and Elyssa’s mother spoke through tears at the ceremony.

“That opened up a lot of things for Elyssa,” Mrs. Sacco said. “She cried the week before and the week after. She listens to sad songs more these past couple of months, and she’s only 6.”

Like Mrs. Williams in Hawaii, Mrs. Sacco has one child who can remember a father and one who cannot, a source of considerable sorrow.

“Anthony was Nick’s only biological child, and I wish he had more time with his father so he would actually remember his face,” Mrs. Sacco said. “At the same time, Elyssa can help me talk about him. She points things out: ‘That’s when your daddy and me and Mommy went to Universal Studios.’ ”

Elyssa has not been excessive with questions about her stepfather’s likes and dislikes. But she is clearly struggling. Despite having had grief counseling, she has fallen behind in school and sometimes acts younger than her years.

“She still has her bad days where out of the blue she’ll cry,” Mrs. Sacco said. “I tell her, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s fine. It hurts.”

In Rochester, John and Cathy Pernaselli, the parents of Petty Officer First Class Michael J. Pernaselli, are raising his daughters, Nicole, 6, and Dominique, 7. Petty Officer Pernaselli was killed in the Persian Gulf in April 2004 during his first tour. He had divorced his wife and secured custody of the two girls.

When Officer Pernaselli died, his daughters, then 3 and 4, had trouble grasping it. “They couldn’t understand why — what had happened,” Mr. Pernaselli said. “They had just talked to him two days before.”

They now see a counselor every week and take comfort in keeping his memory close. Both have pillows on their beds imprinted with his picture and talk to him in their prayers. Both wear gold pendants engraved with his likeness (as Mrs. Pernaselli does). They celebrate his birthday every year. But emotions are raw.

“They’ll say, ‘Why did it have to be my dad?’ ” said Mr. Pernaselli, 55, who works at a Wegmans supermarket. “They’ll hug the pillow and eventually work themselves out of it.”

While fielding questions and providing reassurance can be tiring, it at least plugs a parent or guardian directly into the child’s psyche. In that sense, a child’s volubility can be strangely comforting to some parents. Mrs. Williams now worries about Mya’s recent silence, fearing that her daughter is avoiding discussion of her father as a way to protect both herself and her mother.

After Mya’s second visit to the TAPS grief camp this summer, Mrs. Williams prepared herself for a new round of inquiry about her husband and his death. “I asked her if she had any more questions, and she said, ‘No, I don’t,’ ” Mrs. Williams recalled.

“When she asks me and I start talking about it, my voice gets cracky and tears roll down my face,” she said. “I don’t know if it will ever get better. I see Mya hurting more now because she’s understanding more. In school, when we have family events, that’s the toughest for her. She sees the mommy and the daddy, and it’s just me.”

    Old Enough Now to Ask How Dad Died at War, NYT, 21.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/us/21parent.html?hp

Pentagon Sees One Authority Over Contractors

October 17, 2007
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, Oct. 16 — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is pressing for the nearly 10,000 armed security contractors now working for the United States government in Iraq to fall under a single authority, most likely the American military, in an effort to bring Blackwater USA under tighter control, senior administration officials and Pentagon advisers say.

That idea is facing resistance from the State Department, which relies heavily for protection in Iraq on some 2,500 private guards, including more than 800 Blackwater contractors, to provide security for American diplomats in Baghdad. The State Department has said it should retain control over those guards, despite Blackwater’s role in a September shooting in Baghdad that exposed problems in the current oversight arrangements.

In practical terms, placing the private security guards who now work for the military, the State Department and other government agencies under a single authority would mean that those armed civilians would no longer have different bosses and different rules. Pentagon advisers say it would also allow better coordination between the security contractors and American military commanders, who have long complained that the contractors often operate independently.

Mr. Gates has not publicly stated his final position on any reorganization, but his thinking on how to manage security contractors was described by administration officials, military officers and outside advisers to the Defense Department, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The officials said it was not clear whether Mr. Gates would also recommend changes that would make Blackwater contractors in Iraq subject to military law. Whether Blackwater guards now in Iraq are subject to any kind of legal jeopardy remains unclear, even as the F.B.I. and other American agencies investigate the Sept. 16 shooting, which Iraqi investigators have said killed 17 Iraqi civilians.

In response to the shooting, the State Department has acknowledged the need to tighten controls over Blackwater. But department officials have said that they were tightening controls by sending State Department personnel as monitors on Blackwater security convoys in and around Baghdad, and said that therefore there was no need to shift oversight to the Pentagon.

By contrast, Pentagon and military officials say, Mr. Gates has been told by senior American commanders in Iraq that there must be a single chain of command overseeing the private security contractors working for a variety of United States government agencies in the war zone. The commanders argue that the military is best positioned to be that single authority.

Congress has already voiced its concern over the current legal uncertainty involving American contractors. Earlier this month, the House overwhelmingly approved a bill that would bring all United States government contractors in the Iraq war zone under the jurisdiction of American criminal law. A similar measure is pending in the Senate.

But Pentagon officials remain divided over whether they might recommend additional changes if the contractors were brought under Defense Department authority. Some military commanders in Iraq favor using the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a system they know well and trust. Other Defense Department officials support the model being considered by Congress, which would make clear that the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act would extend federal law to civilians supporting military operations.

The Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said Mr. Gates “has made clear that he supports his commanders’ assertions that, at the very least, they need greater visibility on the work and movements of armed security contractors in Iraq.”

The civilian casualties from contractor gunfire have infuriated the Iraqi government and damaged the American image in the country, frustrating military officers who say the heavy-handed tactics by contractors undermine broader efforts to win the trust of the Iraqi people.

American commanders have a more specific military complaint, as well: They say the security contractors complicate American combat operations, in part because local commanders sometimes do not even know of armed official convoys moving through their areas.

Mr. Gates said this month that 30 percent of the calls for help from security contractors had come from convoys that the military did not know were on the road.

Because of their overseas travel schedules, Mr. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been unable to meet face to face to resolve the issue, officials said. “In no way are we at a point of impasse with the State Department,” said Mr. Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary. “We have not even begun discussions with them at the secretary level on the way forward.”

A State Department official said the department had not yet received any formal proposal from the Pentagon. “Our interests and theirs is ensuring that the activities of personal security contractors are effectively coordinated between the military and the embassy,” the official said. “We’d certainly be interested in hearing any additional ideas that the Defense Department might have.”

One outside adviser to the Pentagon said Mr. Gates felt so strongly that he told associates he was prepared to go to President Bush to decide the matter.

However, that adviser and Pentagon officials said Mr. Gates would not raise the issue with Mr. Bush until he and Ms. Rice had a chance to discuss it with Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, after Ms. Rice returns from her current foreign travels.

Since Mr. Gates was sworn in as defense secretary in December, he has established a far friendlier relationship with Ms. Rice than was maintained by his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld. Mr. Gates and Ms. Rice, who worked together in government previously, share views on many significant issues, including on the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, on dealing with Iran and on the broad outlines for the future of the Iraq mission.

However, tensions have emerged, especially over personnel issues. Earlier this year, Ms. Rice asked the Pentagon, whose budget dwarfs that of the State Department, to help supply people to fill State Department reconstruction positions in Iraq.

As details of the Blackwater shootings have emerged in recent weeks, Mr. Gates has signaled his unease with the existing command and legal authorities governing security contractors.

“Do we have the mechanisms and the means for our commanders to exercise a kind of strategic oversight and assure accountability in terms of the behavior and the conduct of these security contractors?” Mr. Gates asked at the Pentagon on Sept. 27.

“It’s very important that we do everything in our power to make sure that people who are under contract to us are not only abiding by our rules, but are conducting themselves in a way that makes them an asset in this war in Iraq and not a liability,” he added.

    Pentagon Sees One Authority Over Contractors, NYT, 17.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/washington/17blackwater.html?hp

Iraq Drawdown to Begin in Volatile Area

October 17, 2007
Filed at 10:16 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Commanders in Iraq have decided to begin the drawdown of U.S. forces in volatile Diyala province, marking a turning point in the U.S. military mission, The Associated Press has learned.

Instead of replacing the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division, which is returning to its home base at Fort Hood, Texas, in December, soldiers from another brigade in Salahuddin province next door will expand into Diyala, thereby broadening its area of responsibility, several officials said Tuesday.

In this way, the number of Army ground combat brigades in Iraq will fall from 20 to 19. This reflects President Bush's bid to begin reducing the American military force and shifting its role away from fighting the insurgency toward more support functions like training and advising Iraqi security forces.

The December move, which has not yet been announced by the Pentagon, was described to the AP by Col. Stephen Twitty, commander of the 4th Brigade, 1st Cavalry, in a telephone interview Tuesday. It was confirmed by three other officials in Iraq, including Lt. Col. Michael Donnelly, chief spokesman for the commanding general of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon.

The idea is to avoid vacating a contested area, like Diyala, which is northeast of Baghdad, while beginning Bush's announced reduction of at least 21,500 troops, of which 17,000 were sent to the Baghdad area last spring.

The shift in Diyala in December could be a model for follow-on reductions next year, with a redrawing of the U.S. lines of responsibility so that a departing brigade has its battle space consumed by a remaining brigade. At the same time, Iraqi security forces would assume greater responsibility.

Diyala province is a battered landscape of warring tribes, fertile valleys and pockets of al-Qaida fighters. The sectarian and tribal chasms are wide. Commanders cited signs of substantial progress in the months since thousands of U.S. and Iraqi forces stormed the provincial capital of Baqouba in June.

The unit leaving in December, the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry, has been in Iraq since October 2006. When it leaves, the 4th Stryker Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division, now in Salahuddin province, will add Diyala to its area of responsibility.

Donnelly said that even though the number of combat brigades in Iraq will drop by one with the departure of the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry, the total number of soldiers in northern Iraq will remain almost constant. That is because later in December a unit arriving from Fort Hood -- the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment -- has substantially more soldiers than the unit it will replace.

It is not yet clear how the rest of the five-brigade reduction will be carried out; the cuts are to be completed by July 2008, under a plan recommended by Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, and announced by Bush in September. It probably will include some fresh reductions in the western province of Anbar, where insurgent violence has declined substantially this year.

When Bush announced on Sept. 13 that security in Iraq had improved enough to permit the withdrawal of five brigades between December and next July, commanders said they had not yet figured out how it would be done. The reductions will shrink the U.S. force from 20 combat brigades to 15, which is the total that prevailed before Bush decided in January to add five brigades as the centerpiece of a new strategy designed to tamp down sectarian violence mainly in Baghdad.

The 4th Stryker Brigade that will expand its battle space into Diyala province is one of those five so-called surge brigades. It got to Iraq in April and is scheduled to remain until July 2008.

In remarks at the Pentagon on Tuesday, Lt. Gen. Carter Ham, the chief of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the pace at which the five Army brigades are withdrawn ''isn't mechanical'' and will be slowed or accelerated depending on commanders' assessment of security progress.

''It isn't that once it's in motion it will proceed apace -- it could, that is the plan,'' Ham said. ''But at each step along the way commanders will make an assessment: Can we go faster? Do we need to go slower?''

Twitty, commander of the 4th Brigade, 1st Cavalry, in Ninevah province in northwestern Iraq said he believes it would be premature to reduce forces in Ninevah despite an improving capability in the Iraqi army.

''I would be hesitant to reduce from where we are now, and I'll tell you the reason why,'' Twitty said. ''We are focused very heavily on fighting al-Qaida here in Iraq and we have taken the fight to al Qaida over the past several months. I think we need to continue that pressure here.''

    Iraq Drawdown to Begin in Volatile Area, NYT, 17.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq-Military.html

Ex-Commander Says Iraq Effort Is ‘a Nightmare’

October 13, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 — In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration’s handling of the war “incompetent” and said the result was “a nightmare with no end in sight.”

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who retired in 2006 after being replaced in Iraq after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, blamed the Bush administration for a “catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan” and denounced the current addition of American forces as a “desperate” move that would not achieve long-term stability.

“After more than four years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism,” General Sanchez said at a gathering of military reporters and editors in Arlington, Va.

He is the most senior war commander of a string of retired officers who have harshly criticized the administration’s conduct of the war. While much of the previous condemnation has been focused on the role of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, General Sanchez’s was an unusually broad attack on the overall course of the war.

But his own role as commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal leaves him vulnerable to criticism that he is shifting the blame from himself to the administration that ultimately replaced him and declined to nominate him for a fourth star, forcing his retirement.

Though he was cleared of wrongdoing in the abuses after an inquiry by the Army’s inspector general, General Sanchez became a symbol — with civilian officials like L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority — of ineffective American leadership early in the occupation.

General Sanchez said he was convinced that the American effort in Iraq was failing the day after he took command, in June 2003. Asked why he waited until nearly a year after his retirement to voice his concerns publicly, he responded that it was not the place of active-duty officers to challenge lawful orders from the civilian authorities.

General Sanchez, who is said to be considering writing a book, promised further public statements criticizing officials by name.

“There has been a glaring and unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders,” he said, adding that civilian officials have been “derelict in their duties” and guilty of a “lust for power.”

White House officials would not comment directly on General Sanchez’s remarks. “We appreciate his service to the country,” said Kate Starr, a White House spokeswoman.

She noted that Gen. David H. Petraeus, the current top commander in Iraq, and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Baghdad, said in their testimony to Congress last month that “there’s more work to be done, but progress is being made in Iraq. And that’s what we’re focused on now.”

General Sanchez has been criticized by some current and retired officers for failing to recognize the growing insurgency in Iraq during his year in command and for failing to put together a plan to unify the disparate military effort, a task that was finally carried out when his successor, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., took over in mid-2004.

General Sanchez included the military and himself among those who made mistakes in Iraq, citing a failure by top commanders to insist on a better post-invasion stabilization plan. He offered a tepid compliment to General Petraeus. The general, he said, could use American troops to gain time in Iraq but could not achieve lasting results.

Michael E. O’Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution, criticized General Sanchez for implying in his speech that the current military strategy of relying on additional troops and on protecting the Iraqi people is little different than the strategy employed when he was in command.

Noting that calls by members of Congress for troops were rebuffed by the Bush administration in 2003, Mr. O’Hanlon said, “Sanchez was one of the top military people who condoned that, if not directly, then by his silence.”

General Sanchez’s main criticism was leveled at the Bush administration, which he said failed to mobilize the entire United States government, not just the military, to contribute meaningfully to reconstructing and stabilizing Iraq.

“National leadership continues to believe that victory can be achieved by military power alone,” he said. “Continued manipulations and adjustments to our military strategy will not achieve victory. The best we can do with this flawed approach is stave off defeat.”

Asked after his remarks what strategy he favored, General Sanchez ticked off a series of steps—from promoting reconciliation among Iraq’s warring sectarian factions to building effective Iraqi army and police units — that closely paralleled the list of tasks frequently cited by the Bush administration as the pillars of the current strategy.

General Sanchez, now a Pentagon consultant who trains active-duty generals, said the administration’s biggest failure had been its lack of a detailed strategy for achieving those steps and “synchronizing” the military and civilian contributions.

“The administration, Congress and the entire inter-agency, especially the State Department, must shoulder responsibility for the catastrophic failure, and the American people must hold them accountable,” he said.

His talk on Friday at the annual convention of the Military Reporters and Editors Association was not the first time that General Sanchez has been critical of the administration.

He said in an interview in June with Agence France-Presse that the best the United States could achieve in Iraq would be stalemate. And he drew a standing ovation at a gathering of veterans last month when he argued that the country’s problems in Iraq were the result of a “crisis in national political leadership.”

Though General Sanchez remained on active duty after leaving Iraq in 2004, he never received a fourth star, in part because, though he was popular with Mr. Rumsfeld, the Bush administration feared that his nomination hearings in the Senate would turn into a bitter partisan fight and a public replay of the details of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

    Ex-Commander Says Iraq Effort Is ‘a Nightmare’, NYT, 13.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/washington/13general.html

At Army Base, Officers Are Split Over War

October 13, 2007
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — Here in this Western outpost that serves as the intellectual center of the United States Army, two elite officers were deep in debate at lunch on a recent day over who bore more responsibility for mistakes in Iraq — the former defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, or the generals who acquiesced to him.

“The secretary of defense is an easy target,” argued one of the officers, Maj. Kareem P. Montague, 34, a Harvard graduate and a commander in the Third Infantry Division that was the first to reach Baghdad in the 2003 invasion. “It’s easy to pick on the political appointee.”

“But he’s the one that’s responsible,” retorted Maj. Michael J. Zinno, 40, a military planner who worked at the headquarters of the Coalitional Provisional Authority, the former American civilian administration in Iraq.

No, Major Montague shot back, it was more complicated: the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the top commanders were part of the decision to send in a small invasion force and not enough troops for the occupation. Only Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff who was sidelined after he told Congress that it would take several hundred thousand troops in Iraq, spoke up in public.

“You didn’t hear any of them at the time, other than General Shinseki, screaming, saying that this was untenable,” Major Montague said.

As the war grinds through its fifth year, Fort Leavenworth has become a front line in the military’s tension and soul-searching over Iraq. Here on the bluffs above the Missouri River rising young officers are on a different kind of journey — an outspoken re-examination of their role in Iraq.

Discussions between a New York Times reporter and dozens of young majors in five Leavenworth classrooms over two days — all unusual for their frankness in an Army that has traditionally presented a facade of solidarity to the outside world — showed a divide in opinion. Officers were split over whether Mr. Rumsfeld, the military leaders or both deserved blame for what they said were the major errors in the war: sending in a small invasion force and failing to plan properly for the occupation.

But the consensus was that not even after Vietnam was the Army’s internal criticism as harsh or the second-guessing so painful, and that airing the arguments on the record, as sanctioned by Leavenworth’s senior commanders, was part of a concerted effort to force change.

“You spend your whole career worrying about the safety of soldiers — let’s do the training right so no one gets injured, let’s make sure no one gets killed, and then you deploy and you’re attending memorial services for 19-year-olds,” said Maj. Niave Knell, 37, who worked in Baghdad to set up an Iraqi highway patrol. “And you have to think about what you did.”

On one level, second-guessing is institutionalized at Leavenworth, home to the Combined Arms Center, a sprawling Army research center that includes the Command and General Staff College for midcareer officers, the School of Advanced Military Studies for the most elite and the Center for Army Lessons Learned, which collects and disseminates battlefield data. (The center publishes a handbook for soldiers with strategies to help keep them alive for their first 100 days in combat, a response to the high percentage who died in their early months in Iraq.)

At Leavenworth, officers study Napoleon’s battle plans and Lt. William Calley’s mistakes in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Last year Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the top American commander in Iraq, wrote the Army and Marine Corps’ new Counterinsurgency Field Manual there. The goal at Leavenworth is to adapt the Army to the changing battlefield without repeating the mistakes of the past.

But senior officers say that much of the professional second-guessing has become an emotional exercise for young officers. “Many of them have been affected by people they know who died over there,” said Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the Leavenworth commander and the former top spokesman for the American military in Iraq. Unlike the 1991 Persian Gulf war and the conflicts in the Balkans and even Somalia, General Caldwell said, “we just never experienced the loss of life like we have here. And when that happens, it becomes very personal. You want to believe that there’s no question your cause is just and that it has the potential to succeed.”

Much of the debate at the school has centered on a scathing article, “A Failure in Generalship,” written last May for Armed Forces Journal by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, an Iraq veteran and deputy commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment who holds a master’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago. “If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results,” Colonel Yingling wrote.

The article has been required class reading at Leavenworth, where young officers debate whether Colonel Yingling was right to question senior commanders who sent junior officers into battle with so few troops.

“Where I was standing on the street corner, at the 14th of July Bridge, yeah, another brigade there would have been great,” said Maj. Jeffrey H. Powell, 37, a company commander who was referring to the bridge in Baghdad he helped secure during the early days of the war.

Major Powell, who was speaking in a class at the School for Advanced Military Studies, has read many of the Iraq books describing the private disagreements over troop levels between Mr. Rumsfeld and the top commanders, who worried that the numbers were too low but went along in the end.

“Sure, I’m a human being, I question the decision-making process,” Major Powell said. Nonetheless, he said, “we don’t get to sit on the top of the turrets of our tanks and complain that nobody planned for this. Our job is to fix it.”

Discussions nonetheless focused on where young officers might draw a “red line,” the point at which they would defy a command from the civilians — the president and the defense secretary — who lead the military.

“We have an obligation that if our civilian leaders give us an order, unless it is illegal, immoral or unethical, then we’re supposed to execute it, and to not do so would be considered insubordinate,” said Major Timothy Jacobsen, another student. “How do you define what is truly illegal, immoral or unethical? At what point do you cross that threshold where this is no longer right, I need to raise my hand or resign or go to the media?”General Caldwell, who was the top military aide from 2002 to 2004 to the deputy defense secretary at the time, Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war, would not talk about the meetings he had with Mr. Wolfowitz about the battle plans at the time. “We did have those discussions, and he would engage me on different things, but I’d feel very uncomfortable talking,” General Caldwell said.

Col. Gregory Fontenot, a Leavenworth instructor, said it was typical of young officers to feel that the senior commanders had not spoken up for their interests, and that he had felt the same way when he was their age. But Colonel Fontenot, who commanded a battalion in the Persian Gulf war and a brigade in Bosnia and has since retired, said he questioned whether Americans really wanted a four-star general to stand up publicly and say no to the president in a nation where civilians control the armed forces.

For the sake of argument, a question from the reporter was posed: If enough four-star generals had done that, would it have stopped the war?

“Yeah, we’d call it a coup d’etat,” Colonel Fontenot said. “Do you want to have a coup d’etat? You kind of have to decide what you want. Do you like the Constitution, or are you so upset about the Iraq war that you’re willing to dismiss the Constitution in just this one instance and hopefully things will be O.K.? I don’t think so.”

Some of the young officers were unimpressed by retired officers who spoke up against Mr. Rumsfeld in April 2006. The retired generals had little to lose, they argued, and their words would have mattered more had they been on active duty. “Why didn’t you do that while you were still in uniform?” Maj. James Hardaway, 36,asked.

On the other hand, Major Hardaway said, General Shinseki had shown there was a great cost, at least under Mr. Rumsfeld. “Evidence shows that when you do do that in uniform, bad things can happen,” he said. “So, it’s sort of a dichotomy of, should I do the right thing, even if I get punished?”

Another major said that young officers were engaged in their own revisionist history, and that many had believed the war could be won with Mr. Rumsfeld’s initial invasion force of about 170,000. “Everybody now claims, oh, I knew we were going to be there for five years and it was going to take 400,000 people,” said Maj. Patrick Proctor, 36. “Nobody wants to be the guy who said, ‘Yeah, I thought we could do it.’ But a lot of us did.”

One question that silenced many of the officers was a simple one: Should the war have been fought?

“I honestly don’t know how I feel about that,” Major Powell said in a telephone conversation last week after the discussions at Leavenworth.

“That’s a big, open question,” General Caldwell said after a long pause.

    At Army Base, Officers Are Split Over War, NYT, 13.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/us/13cnd-army.html?hp

U.S. Plans Inquiry on Strike That Killed Civilians

October 13, 2007
The New York Times
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER

BAGHDAD, Oct. 12 — The American military said today it was vigorously investigating a Thursday evening air strike on a stronghold of senior insurgent leaders northwest of Baghdad also killed nine children and six women, one of the highest tolls to result from a single American military action since the beginning of the Iraq war.

Rear Adm. Greg Smith, an American military spokesman here, said the killings were “absolutely regrettable,” but blamed the enemy fighters for engaging American forces while using civilians as a shield.

“We do not target civilians,” the admiral said in an interview today. “But when our forces are fired upon, as they are routinely, then they have no option but to return fire.”

The air strike, near Lake Tharthar, a Sunni Arab region about 75 northwest of Baghdad, killed 19 senior-level insurgents with ties to al Qaeda in Mesopotamia after insurgents first fired on a unit of American soldiers approaching a residential structure.

“A ground element came under fire from that building that we had to neutralize,” Admiral Smith said. Nineteen insurgents were reported killed. It was not clear on Friday whether American commanders knew so many civilians were in or near the structure when they authorized the air strike on it.

“The enemy has a vote here,” Admiral Smith said, “and when he chooses to surround himself with civilians and then fire upon U.S. forces, our forces have no choice but to return a commensurate amount of fire. Which is what they did last evening.”

The civilian deaths, on the eve of the Id al-Fitr holiday to celebrate the end of Ramadan, came at a time of extreme sensitivity among Iraqi and American officials here to the mistaken or inadvertent killing of noncombatants by American military and private security forces.

Also on Friday, a suicide bomber pushing a candy cart into a playground in the northern town of Tuz Khormato Friday morning killed one 8-year-old boy and wounded 23 others, a senior police official said. A security guard, whose child was playing in the park, was also killed after he tried to subdue the bomber as he entered the playground, said Lt. Col. Abbas Mohammad, the city’s police chief.

Colonel Mohammad identified the guard as Abbas Sameen, 35, the father of three children. He said the boy killed was Qasem Hasan Ismael.

Friday was a national holiday, when Sunni Arab Muslims broke fast to celebrate the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. As is custom, the children in Tuz Khormato, a religiously mixed city of Sunnis, Shiite, Turkmen and Kurdish residents, were playing in a temporary playground — in a lot usually reserved for truck parking — filled with temporary carnival rides and confection booths.

Mudhafer al-Husaini contributed reporting from Baghdad and an Iraqi stringer from Kirkuk.

    U.S. Plans Inquiry on Strike That Killed Civilians, NYT, 13.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html

Marines Press to Remove Their Forces From Iraq

October 11, 2007
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 — The Marine Corps is pressing to remove its forces from Iraq and to send marines instead to Afghanistan, to take over the leading role in combat there, according to senior military and Pentagon officials.

The idea by the Marine Corps commandant would effectively leave the Iraq war in the hands of the Army while giving the Marines a prominent new role in Afghanistan, under overall NATO command.

The suggestion was raised in a session last week convened by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and regional war-fighting commanders. While still under review, its supporters, including some in the Army, argue that a realignment could allow the Army and Marines each to operate more efficiently in sustaining troop levels for two wars that have put a strain on their forces.

As described by officials who had been briefed on the closed-door discussion, the idea represents the first tangible new thinking to emerge since the White House last month endorsed a plan to begin gradual troop withdrawals from Iraq, but also signals that American forces likely will be in Iraq for years to come.

At the moment, there are no major Marine units among the 26,000 or so American forces in Afghanistan. In Iraq there are about 25,000 marines among the 160,000 American troops there.

It is not clear exactly how many of the marines in Iraq would be moved over. But the plan would require a major reshuffling, and it would make marines the dominant American force in Afghanistan, in a war that has broader public support than the one in Iraq.

Mr. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have not spoken publicly about the Marine concept, and aides to both officials said no formal proposal had been presented by the Marines. But the idea has been the focus of intense discussions between senior Marine Corps officers and other officials within the Defense Department.

It is not clear whether the Army would support the idea. But some officials sympathetic to the Army said that such a realignment would help ease some pressure on the Army, by allowing it to shift forces from Afghanistan into Iraq, and by simplifying planning for future troop rotations.

The Marine proposal could also face resistance from the Air Force, whose current role in providing combat aircraft for Afghanistan could be squeezed if the overall mission was handed to the Marines. Unlike the Army, the Marines would bring a significant force of combat aircraft to that conflict.

Whether the Marine proposal takes hold, the most delicate counterterrorism missions in Afghanistan, including the hunt for forces of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, would remain the job of a military task force that draws on Army, Navy and Air Force Special Operations units.

Military officials say the Marine proposal is also an early indication of jockeying among the four armed services for a place in combat missions in years to come. “At the end of the day, this could be decided by parochialism, and making sure each service does not lose equity, as much as on how best to manage the risk of force levels for Iraq and Afghanistan,” said one Pentagon planner.

Tensions over how to divide future budgets have begun to resurface across the military because of apprehension that Congressional support for large increases in defense spending seen since the Sept. 11 attacks will diminish, leaving the services to compete for money.

Those traditional turf battles have subsided somewhat given the overwhelming demands of waging two simultaneous wars — and because Pentagon budgets reached new heights.

Last week, the Senate approved a $459 billion Pentagon spending bill, an increase of $43 billion, or more than 10 percent over the last budget. That bill did not include, as part of a separate bill, President Bush’s request for almost $190 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senior officials briefed on the Marine Corps concept said the new idea went beyond simply drawing clearer lines about who was in charge of providing combat personnel, war-fighting equipment and supplies to the two war zones.

They said it would allow the Marines to carry out the Afghan mission in a way the Army cannot, by deploying as an integrated Marine Corps task force that included combat aircraft as well as infantry and armored vehicles, while the Army must rely on the Air Force.

The Marine Corps concept was raised last week during a Defense Senior Leadership Conference convened by Mr. Gates just hours after Admiral Mullen was sworn in as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

During that session, the idea of assigning the Afghan mission to the Marines was described by Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant. Details of the discussion were provided by military officers and Pentagon civilian officials briefed on the session and who requested anonymity to summarize portions of the private talks.

The Marine Corps has recently played the leading combat role in Anbar Province, the restive Sunni area west of Baghdad.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior Army officer in Iraq, and his No. 2 commander, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, also of the Army, have described Anbar Province as a significant success story, with local tribal leaders joining the fight against terrorists.

Both generals strongly hint that if the security situation in Anbar holds steady, then reductions of American forces can be expected in the province, which could free up Marine units to move elsewhere.

In recent years, the emphasis by the Pentagon has been on joint operations that blur the lines between the military services, but there is also considerable precedent for geographic divisions in their duties. For much of the Vietnam War, responsibility was divided region by region between the Army and the Marines. As described by military planners, the Marine proposal would allow Marine units moved to Afghanistan to take over the tasks now performed by an Army headquarters unit and two brigade combat teams operating in eastern Afghanistan.

That would ease the strain on the Army and allow it to focus on managing overall troop numbers for Iraq, as well as movements of forces inside the country as required by commanders to meet emerging threats.

The American military prides itself on the ability to go to war as a “joint force,” with all of the armed services intermixed on the battlefield — vastly different from past wars when more primitive communications required separate ground units to fight within narrowly defined lanes to make sure they did not cross into the fire of friendly forces.

The Marine Corps is designed to fight with other services — it is based overseas aboard Navy ships and is intertwined with the Army in Iraq. At the same time, the Marines also are designed to be an agile, “expeditionary” force on call for quick deployment, and thus can go to war with everything needed to carry out the mission — troops, armor, attack jets and supplies.

General Petraeus is due to report back to Congress by March on his troop requirements beyond the summer. His request for forces will be analyzed by the military’s Central Command, which oversees combat missions across the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and by the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. All troop deployment orders must be approved by Mr. Gates, with the separate armed services then assigned to supply specific numbers of troops and equipment.

Marines train to fight in what is called a Marine Air-Ground Task Force. That term refers to a Marine deployment that arrives in a combat zone complete with its own headquarters, infantry combat troops, armored and transport vehicles and attack jets for close-air support, as well as logistics and support personnel.

“This is not about trading one ground war for another,” said one Pentagon official briefed on the Marine concept. “It is about the nature of the fight in Afghanistan, and figuring out whether the Afghan mission lends itself more readily to the integrated MAGTF deployment than even Iraq.”

    Marines Press to Remove Their Forces From Iraq, NYT, 11.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/washington/11military.html?hp

Iraq Says Security Firm Kills 2 Women

October 9, 2007
Filed at 12:24 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Guards in a security convoy opened fire on a car at an intersection in central Baghdad on Tuesday, killing two Christian women, police said. Separately, suicide car bombings targeting a local police chief and a Sunni sheik working with U.S. forces killed at least 19 people.

Across Iraq, violence claimed the lives of at least 44 people.

Police and witnesses could not immediately give more details about the gunmen in Baghdad except to say they were in a convoy of four SUVs commonly used by private security companies and the Iraqi Ministry of Interior.

Blackwater USA denied any involvement in Tuesday's deaths, which threatened to increase calls for limits on the security firms that mounted after the Sept. 16 shooting deaths of as many as 17 Iraqi civilians allegedly that company's guards. In that case, the American security company said its employees were acting in self-defense.

The women were in a white car that drove into the Masbah intersection in the central Karradah district as the convoy of three white and one gray SUVs was stopped about 100 yards away, according to a policeman who witnessed the shooting from a nearby checkpoint.

The men in the SUVs threw a smoke bomb in an apparent bid to warn the car against coming forward, said Riyadh Majid, the policeman. The woman driving the car tried to stop, but was killed along with the passenger when two of the guards in the convoy opened fire, Majid said.

The pavement where the attack occurred was stained with blood and covered with shattered glass from the car windows.

He said the convoy then raced away and Iraqi police came to collect the bodies and tow the car to the local police station.

Another policeman, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retribution, said the guards were masked and wearing khaki uniforms. He said one of them left the vehicle and started to shoot at the car while another opened fire from the open back door of a separate SUV.

The victims were identified by relatives and police as Marou Awanis, born in 1959, as Geneva Jalal, born in 1977.

''These are innocent people killed by people who have no heart or consciousness. The Iraqi people have no value to them,'' said a man who was part of a group of relatives gathered with a Christian priest at the local police station.

The man said Awanis had three daughters. ''Who will now raise the girls? They are now motherless,'' he said.

Awanis' sister-in-law, Anahet Bougous, said the woman was using her car to taxi government employees to work to help raise money for her three daughters.

''May God take revenge on those killers,'' Bougous said, crying outside the police station. ''Now, who is going to raise them?''

The nearly simultaneous attacks in Beiji were the deadliest in a series of bombings in recent days as the terror network apparently steps up its promised Ramadan offensive as the end of the Islamic holy month draws near.

The attackers in the oil hub 155 miles north of Baghdad drove a minibus laden with explosives into the house of a local police chief and detonated an explosives-packed Toyota Land Cruiser outside the home of a leading member of the local Awakening Council, a group of Iraqis who have turned against extremists in the area.

A Sunni mosque about 100 yards away from the police chief's house was damaged and three of its guards were among at least 19 people killed, according to police and hospital officials.

Iraqi officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information, said the police chief, Col. Saad al-Nifoos, and the Sunni tribal official, Sheik Hamad al-Jibouri, survived.

The U.S. military said the targeted Awakening Council leader was Samir Ibrahim, not Sheik Hamad. It also said Ibrahim and the police chief had survived.

Saleh Jassim Moussa said two of his relatives from the neighborhood were killed.

The force of the blast was so strong, it shattered all the windows and ripped the doors from their frames in his home, only 100 yards away from the first explosion.

''It was a really huge explosion, we panicked and ran out but for minutes, we couldn't see anything because of the heavy smoke,'' said Moussa, 38, a government employee, who was reached by phone. ''We're still digging through the rubble, looking for others.''

Beiji is in the Sunni province of Salahuddin, which along with the vast Anbar province to the west is part of Iraq's Sunni heartland. The heartland has been the home base for the Sunni-led insurgency, but the U.S. military has cited recent success in getting local tribal leaders to join forces against the terror network.

''This is yet another failed attempt to break the will of the Iraqi people who just want to go on with their lives without violence, raise their children, earn a living and coexist together in a peaceful manner,'' said Lt. Col. Michael O. Donnelly, military spokesman for northern Iraq.

------

Associated Press writers Katarina Kratovac and Sameer N. Yacoub contributed to this story.

    Iraq Says Security Firm Kills 2 Women, NYT, 9.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

Opening of US Embassy in Iraq Delayed

October 5, 2007
Filed at 2:39 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The opening of a mammoth, $600 million U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, which had been planned for last month, has now been delayed well into next year, U.S. officials said Thursday. The Vatican-sized compound, which will be the world's largest diplomatic mission, has been beset by construction and logistical problems.

''They are substantially behind at this point,'' and it would be surprising if any offices or living quarters could be occupied before the end of the year, one official told The Associated Press.

Problems identified so far are related to the complex's physical plant, including electrical systems, and do not pose a security risk, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

The official also said the delays would have no direct cost to taxpayers because contractor First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting Co. had agreed to deliver for a set $592 million price.

That official, and another who works in Iraq, said it had been clear for some time that the promised September completion date could not be met and that State Department officials had been overly optimistic in insisting the timeline was realistic.

State Department spokesmen have in the past played down construction problems at the embassy and attributed them to the normal hurdles faced in building such a large complex.

Deputy spokesman Tom Casey said Thursday he was not aware of any new major delay in the opening of the embassy that will sit on a 104-acre site and have working space for about 1,000 people.

The U.S. official said the complex was supposed to be substantially completed in August. The first move of offices or personnel from temporary quarters in the fortified Green Zone had been planned for this fall.

Embassy employees have been working and living in a makeshift complex in and around a Saddam-era palace that the Iraqis have said they want back quickly.

The temporary quarters are cramped and increasingly dangerous. Many employees live in trailers that are not fully protected from mortars fired from outside the Green Zone.

Insurgents have gotten better at firing into the heavily guarded zone in attacks this year have killed several people. The new complex is supposed to be safer, with additional blast walls and other protection.

In a letter sent to Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte on Thursday, Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., chairman of the House International Relations Committee, demanded explanations for what was holding up the project.

''I am writing to express my serious concern that our new embassy compound in Iraq is apparently facing significant contractor deficiencies that will delay its opening for weeks or even months past its promised delivery date of September 2007,'' Lantos wrote.

''These delays and deficiencies undermine the security and the living standards of the almost 1,000 foreign service officers and other embassy staff that will be housed at the Baghdad embassy, and they raise serious concerns about Department of State contracting for new embassy construction in other locations as well,'' he said.

Lantos noted that his committee had been assured on numerous occasions by State Department officials, notably by retired Army Maj. Gen. Charles Williams, who oversees embassy construction projects around the world, that the construction would be completed on time.

''Why was the committee assured as late as August that the embassy would open on time when these obviously significant defects existed?'' he asked.

Casey, the deputy spokesman, could not say if Negroponte had seen Lantos' letter.

Another influential lawmaker, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee, has harshly criticized the State Department and its inspector general for failing to follow up on allegations of malfeasance and fraud by the embassy contractors.

The new questions come as the department is struggling to deal with the furor over a Sept. 16 incident in which private security guards protecting an embassy convoy were involved in a shooting in Baghdad.

At least 13 Iraqi civilians were killed in the incident, which has sparked Iraqi anger and prompted several separate investigations into not only the shooting, but the State Department's security practices and reliance on private contractors in Iraq.

    Opening of US Embassy in Iraq Delayed, NYT, 5.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq-Embassy.html

U.S. Says It Kills 25 in Iraq Gun Battle

October 5, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:53 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- U.S. forces killed at least 25 members of a rogue Shiite militia in a heavy firefight early Friday, the military said.

The troops were targeting a militia commander believed to be associated with members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force and responsible for moving weapons from Iran into Baghdad, the military said.

A group of men opened fire on the U.S. soldiers with assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and at least one man was carrying what appeared to be an anti-aircraft weapon, the military said. Two buildings were destroyed and at least 25 people were killed in the ensuing battle.

U.S. aircraft repeatedly bombed the Shiite section of Khalis, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, according to an Iraqi army official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information. At least 17 were killed, 27 were wounded and eight others were missing, he said.

He said civilians were killed when they rushed out to help those hurt in the initial bombing. The U.S. military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The town's mayor said the U.S. military targeted areas built up by locals to protect their Shiite neighborhood against attacks by al-Qaida gunmen.

''These places came under attack by American airstrikes,'' said Khalis Mayor Oday al-Khadran.

Since launching a Baghdad security crackdown more than seven months ago, U.S. troops have increasingly engaged groups that splintered off the country's most powerful Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army.

The Mahdi Army is nominally loyal to the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who in August ordered a temporary freeze on his followers' activities -- including attacks on U.S. troops.

The U.S. military describes the splinter factions as ''extremist'' or ''criminal'' militiamen.

''We continue to support the government of Iraq in welcoming the commitment by Muqtada al-Sadr to stop attacks and we will continue to show restraint in dealing with those who honor his pledge,'' Maj. Anton Alston, a U.S. military spokesman, said Friday. ''We will not show the same restraint against those criminals who dishonor this pledge by attacking security forces and Iraqi citizens.''

    U.S. Says It Kills 25 in Iraq Gun Battle, NYT, 5.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq-Firefight.html

Drop in Violence in Iraq Reported

October 1, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:21 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Deaths among American forces and Iraqi civilians fell dramatically last month to their lowest levels in more than a year, according to figures compiled by the U.S. military, the Iraqi government and The Associated Press.

The decline signaled a U.S. success in bringing down violence in Baghdad and surrounding regions since Washington completed its infusion of 30,000 more troops on June 15.

A total of 64 American forces died in September -- the lowest monthly toll since July 2006.

The decline in Iraqi civilian deaths was even more dramatic, falling from 1,975 in August to 922 last month, a decline of 53.3 percent. The breakdown in September was 844 civilians and 78 police and Iraqi soldiers, according to Iraq's ministries of Health, Interior and Defense.

In August, AP figures showed 1,809 civilians and 155 police and Iraqi soldiers were killed in sectarian violence.

The civilian death toll has not been so low since June 2006, when 847 Iraqis died.

''There is no silver bullet or one thing that equates as a reason to the drop in Iraqi and Coalition casualties and deaths,'' said Col. Steven Boylan, spokesman for U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus.

But he credited increased U.S. troop strength, saying that has allowed American forces to step up operations against al-Qaida in Iraq.

In violence Monday, a suicide car bomber detonated his explosives just outside the gates of Mosul University, killing an agriculture professor, said police spokesman Abdul Karim al-Jbouri said. Less than an hour later, police found a second bomb in an empty car nearby and safely detonated it.

Over the weekend, U.S. and Iraqi forces killed more than 60 insurgent and militia fighters in intense battles, with most of the casualties believed to have been al-Qaida militants, officials said.

U.S. aircraft killed more than 20 al-Qaida in Iraq fighters who opened fire on an American air patrol northwest of Baghdad, the U.S. command said Sunday.

The firefight between U.S. aircraft and the insurgent fighters occurred Saturday after the aircraft observed about 25 people carrying AK-47 assault rifles -- one brandishing a rocket-propelled grenade -- into a palm grove, the military said.

''Shortly after spotting the men, the aircraft were fired upon by the insurgent fighters,'' it said.

The command said more than 20 of the group were killed and four vehicles were destroyed. No Iraqi civilians or U.S. soldiers were hurt.

Iraq's Defense Ministry said in an e-mail Sunday that Iraqi soldiers had killed 44 ''terrorists'' over the past 24 hours. The operations were centered in Salahuddin and Diyala provinces and around the city of Kirkuk, where the ministry said its soldiers had killed 40 and arrested eight. It said 52 fighters were arrested altogether.

The ministry did not further identify those killed, but use of the word ''terrorists'' normally indicates al-Qaida.

The U.S. Embassy, meanwhile, joined a broad swath of Iraqi politicians -- both Shiite and Sunni -- in criticizing a nonbinding U.S. Senate resolution seen here as a recipe for splitting the country along sectarian and ethnic lines.

The Senate resolution, adopted last week, proposed reshaping Iraq according to three sectarian or ethnic territories. It calls for a limited central government with the bulk of power going to the country's Shiite, Sunni or Kurdish regions, envisioning a power-sharing agreement similar to the one that ended the 1990s war in Bosnia. Senator Joseph Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate, was a prime sponsor.

In a highly unusual, unsigned statement, the U.S. Embassy said resolution would seriously hamper Iraq's future stability: ''Our goal in Iraq remains the same: a united, democratic, federal Iraq that can govern, defend, and sustain itself.''

------

AP correspondents Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Katarina Kratovac and Kim Curtis contributed to this report.

    Drop in Violence in Iraq Reported, NYT, 1.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html?hp

New Group Boasts Big War Chest and Rising Voice

September 30, 2007
The New York Times
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.

Freedom’s Watch, a deep-pocketed conservative group led by two former senior White House officials, made an audacious debut in late August when it began a $15 million advertising campaign designed to maintain Congressional support for President Bush’s troop increase in Iraq.

Founded this summer by a dozen wealthy conservatives, the nonprofit group is set apart from most advocacy groups by the immense wealth of its core group of benefactors, its intention to far outspend its rivals and its ambition to pursue a wide-ranging agenda. Its next target: Iran policy.

Next month, Freedom’s Watch will sponsor a private forum of 20 experts on radical Islam that is expected to make the case that Iran poses a direct threat to the security of the United States, according to several benefactors of the group.

Although the group declined to identify the experts, several were invited from the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington research group with close ties to the White House. Some institute scholars have advocated a more confrontational policy to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, including keeping military action as an option.

Last week, a Freedom’s Watch newspaper advertisement called President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran “a terrorist.” The group is considering a national advertising campaign focused on Iran, a senior benefactor said, though Matt S. David, a spokesman for the group, declined to comment on those plans.

“If Hitler’s warnings were heeded when he wrote ‘Mein Kampf,’ he could have been stopped,” said Bradley Blakeman, 49, the president of Freedom’s Watch and a former deputy assistant to Mr. Bush. “Ahmadinejad is giving all the same kind of warning signs to us, and the region — he wants the destruction of the United States and the destruction of Israel.”

With a forceful message and a roster of wealthy benefactors, Freedom’s Watch has quickly emerged from the crowded field of nonprofit advocacy groups as a conservative answer to the 9-year-old liberal MoveOn.org, which vehemently opposes the Iraq war.

The idea for Freedom’s Watch was hatched in March at the winter meeting of Republican Jewish Coalition in Manalapan, Fla., where Vice President Dick Cheney was the keynote speaker, according to participants. Next week, the group is moving into a 10,000-square-foot office in the Chinatown section of Washington, with plans to employ as many as 50 people by early next year.

One benefactor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the group was hoping to raise as much as $200 million by November 2008. Raising big money “will be easy,” the benefactor said, adding that several of the founders each wrote a check for $1 million. Mr. Blakeman would not confirm or deny whether any donor gave $1 million, or more, to the organization.

Since the group is organized as a tax-exempt organization, it does not have to reveal its donors and it can not engage in certain types of partisan activities that directly support political candidates. It denies coordinating its activities with the White House, although many of its donors and organizers are well connected to the administration, including Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary.

“Ideologically, we are inspired by much of Ronald Reagan’s thinking — peace through strength, protect and defend America, and prosperity through free enterprise,” Mr. Fleischer said.

Among the group’s founders are Sheldon G. Adelson, the chairman and chief executive of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, who ranks sixth on the Forbes Magazine list of the world’s billionaires; Mel Sembler, a shopping center magnate based in St. Petersburg, Fla., who served as the ambassador to Italy and Australia; John M. Templeton Jr., the conservative philanthropist from Bryn Mawr, Pa.; and Anthony H. Gioia, a former ambassador to Malta who heads an investment group based in Buffalo, N.Y. All four men are long-time prolific donors who have raised money on behalf of Republican and conservative causes.

For years, the group’s founders lamented MoveOn’s growing influence, derived in large part from its grass-roots efforts, especially on the debate about the Iraq war. “A bunch of us activists kept watching MoveOn and its attacks on the war, and it just got to be obnoxious,” said Mr. Sembler, a friend of Vice President Dick Cheney. “We decided we needed to do something about this, because the conservative side was not responding.”

Mr. Sembler, who is on the board of directors of the American Enterprise Institute, said the impetus for Freedom’s Watch “came out of A.E.I.” last winter. He said that at an institute event in December 2006 he listened to retired Gen. Jack Keane and Frederick W. Kagan, an A.E.I. scholar, talk about the need for a troop increase in Iraq, a plan adopted by Mr. Bush in January. “I realized it was not only what we needed to do,” Mr. Sembler said, “but we needed to articulate this message across the country.”

Mr. Sembler also said he was frustrated that he heard reports at institute events earlier this year that the increase was working, but that the news media was not reflecting the progress.

Mr. Fleischer said: “After the president announced the surge, and even Republicans started getting nervous, there was a palpable fear among several of us that this fall Congress was going to cut off the funding and the Middle East would explode and America would likely get hit. It really wasn’t much more complicated than that.”

Over the summer, Mr. Fleischer and the other founders recruited a president, choosing Mr. Blakeman, who served as a deputy assistant to the president in charge of scheduling and appointments. In 2000, Mr. Blakeman led the Bush-Cheney campaign’s public relations effort during the 36 days of the deadlocked election. He left the White House in January 2004.

Mr. Blakeman and Mr. Fleischer said they intended to turn Freedom’s Watch into a permanent fixture among Washington advocacy groups, waging a “never-ending campaign” on an array of foreign policy and domestic issues. They also hope to build an active, grass-roots support network.

But Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org, which was founded in 1998 by two Silicon Valley venture capitalists, said he doubted the group’s ability to meet that goal.

“This is the fourth or the fifth group that intends to be the right-wing MoveOn,” Mr. Pariser said, naming other fledgling groups like TheVanguard.org and Grassfire.org. “So far, it’s not clear that this group is anything other than a big neoconservative slush fund. They are a White House front group with a few consultants who are trying to make a very unpopular position on the war appear more palpable.”

Like Freedom’s Watch, MoveOn had its origins in an attempt by wealthy political donors, including George Soros, to shape the debate in Washington. MoveOn began shortly after the Starr report was delivered to Congress in September 1998, detailing accusations of perjury and obstruction of justice against President Bill Clinton.

Already, Freedom’s Watch and MoveOn have clashed through competing advertisements over Gen. David H. Petraeus’s war progress report to Congress earlier this month.

In one Freedom’s Watch ad, Sgt. John Kriesel, a National Guardsman from Stillwater, Minn., who lost his legs in a bomb attack near Falluja, pleads with Congress and the American people not to “surrender” in Iraq. As the screen shows a still photograph of the second hijacked plane bearing down on the burning World Trade Center, Sergeant Kriesel adds, “They attacked us, and they will again. They won’t stop in Iraq.”

Several of the group’s spots suggested that Iraq, rather than Al Qaeda, was behind the Sept. 11 attacks, even though the independent Sept. 11 commission investigation and other inquiries found no evidence of Iraq’s involvement. But in August, when the organization rolled out the advertisement with Sergeant Kriesel to two focus groups in Pennsylvania, its upbeat, patriotic message was well received, even causing a few viewers to weep, Mr. Blakeman said.

“The focus groups couldn’t tell whether it was a Republican ad or a Democratic ad,” he said. “It was the voice of a soldier, and that’s the message we want to deliver to Americans: listen to the opinions of real people.”

The campaign was seen as a way to head off any momentum in Congress toward halting the financing for the Iraq war. The group’s advertisements, placed in nearly 60 Congressional districts in 23 states, targeted wavering moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats.

Freedom’s Watch also pounced on MoveOn.org’s full-page “General Betray Us” advertisement published Sept. 10 in The New York Times. Mr. Bush called the advertisement “disgusting.” Both chambers of Congress passed resolutions condemning the advertisement. The New York Times was also embroiled in the debate after giving MoveOn a discounted price for the advertisement, which the newspaper later acknowledged was a mistake. MoveOn has since agreed to pay the difference.

That advertisement, Mr. Blakeman said, “was an unexpected gift,” allowing Freedom’s Watch to “take the high road” and demonstrate that it is a “conservative voice that is not divisive.”

Mr. Pariser, of MoveOn, said his group’s grass-roots membership — it claims 3.3 million members — was the envy of Freedom’s Watch. “I think people see that Freedom’s Watch is a few billionaires, and not a large, mainstream constituency,” he said.

Mr. Blakeman denied the accusation that Freedom’s Watch is a White House front group. “I don’t need their help,” he said of his former colleagues at the White House. “I don’t seek their help. And they don’t offer it.” Mr. Blakeman is a long-time friend of Ed Gillespie, the new counselor to Mr. Bush who succeeded Dan Bartlett. Mr. Blakeman said that he spoke frequently with Mr. Gillespie, but that they were careful not to discuss the activities of Freedom’s Watch.

Mr. Fleischer said Freedom’s Watch was not coordinating with the White House and had an agenda beyond the Bush administration. “On Jan. 21, 2009, what will these critics say when we are still here, doing the same thing?” he said. “We will still be here after George Bush is gone.”

    New Group Boasts Big War Chest and Rising Voice, NYT, 29.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/us/politics/30watch.html?hp

Wounded Vets Also Suffer Financial Woes

September 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:57 p.m. ET
The New York Times

TEMECULA, Calif. (AP) -- He was one of America's first defenders on Sept. 11, 2001, a Marine who pulled burned bodies from the ruins of the Pentagon. He saw more horrors in Kuwait and Iraq.

Today, he can't keep a job, pay his bills, or chase thoughts of suicide from his tortured brain. In a few weeks, he may lose his house, too.

Gamal Awad, the American son of a Sudanese immigrant, exemplifies an emerging group of war veterans: the economic casualties.

More than in past wars, many wounded troops are coming home alive from the Middle East. That's a triumph for military medicine. But they often return hobbled by prolonged physical and mental injuries from homemade bombs and the unremitting anxiety of fighting a hidden enemy along blurred battle lines. Treatment, recovery and retraining often can't be assured quickly or cheaply.

These troops are just starting to seek help in large numbers, more than 185,000 so far. But the cost of their benefits is already testing resources set aside by government and threatening the future of these wounded veterans for decades to come, say economists and veterans' groups.

''The wounded and their families no longer trust that the government will take care of them the way they thought they'd be taken care of,'' says veterans advocate Mary Ellen Salzano.

How does a war veteran expect to be treated? ''As a hero,'' she says.

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Every morning, Awad needs to think of a reason not to kill himself.

He can't even look at the framed photograph that shows him accepting a Marine heroism medal for his recovery work at the Pentagon after the terrorist attack.

It might remind him of a burned woman whose skin peeled off in his hands when he tried to comfort her.

He tries not to hear the shrieking rockets of Iraq either, smell the burning fuel, or relive the blast that blew him right out of bed.

The memories come steamrolling back anyway.

''Nothing can turn off those things,'' he says, voice choked and eyes glistening.

He stews alternately over suicide and finances, his $43,000 in credit card debt, his $4,330 in federal checks each month -- the government's compensation for his total disability from post-traumatic stress disorder. His flashbacks, thoughts of suicide, and anxiety over imagined threats -- all documented for six years in his military record -- keep him from working.

The disability payments don't cover the $5,700-a-month cost of his adjustable home mortgage and equity loans. He owes more on his house than its market value, so he can't sell it -- but he may soon lose it to the bank.

''I love this house. It makes me feel safe,'' he says.

Awad could once afford it. He used to earn $100,000 a year as a 16-year veteran major with a master's degree in management who excelled at logistics. Now, at age 38, he can't even manage his own life.

There's another twist. This dedicated Marine was given a ''general'' discharge 15 months ago for an extramarital affair with a woman, also a Marine. That's even though his military therapists blamed this impulsive conduct on post-traumatic stress aggravated by his Middle East tours.

Luckily, his discharge, though not unqualifiedly honorable, left intact his rights to medical care and disability payments -- or he'd be in sadder shape.

Divorced since developing PTSD, Awad has two daughters who live elsewhere. He spends much of his days hoisting weights and thwacking a punching bag in the dimness of his garage. He passes nights largely sleepless, a zombie shuffling through the bare rooms of his home in sunny California wine country.

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Few anticipated the high price of caring for Awad and other veterans with deep, slow-healing wounds.

Afghanistan seemed quiet and Saddam Hussein still ruled Iraq one year after the Sept. 11 attacks. That's when the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs guaranteed two years of free care to returning combat veterans for virtually any medical condition with a possible service link.

Later, few predicted such a protracted war in Iraq. ''A lot of people based their planning on low numbers of casualties in a very short war,'' says Paul Rieckhoff, an Army combat veteran who founded Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Also, Iraqi insurgents have relied on disfiguring bombs and bombardment as chief tactics. At the same time, better armor and field medicine have kept U.S. soldiers alive at the highest rate ever, leaving 16 wounded for every fatality, according to one study based on government data. The ratio was fewer than 3-to-1 for Korea and Vietnam.

On the flip side, many are returning with multiple amputations or other disabling injuries not completely fixed even by fancy prosthetics, methodical rehabilitation, and job retraining. The Pentagon counts more than 29,000 combat wounded in the Middle East since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Tens of thousands more were hurt outside of combat or in ways that show up later.

There was no mistaking the wounds of Cambodian-American Sgt. Pisey Tan. Eight months into his second tour in Iraq, a makeshift bomb blasted his armored vehicle and took both his legs.

Still, Tan has needed to rely on private donations and family, as well as the government. The government treated him and paid for his artificial legs.

But his brother, Dada, left college to live with him at a military hospital for almost a year. Later, his brother carried him piggyback up and down the stairs at home as Tan got used to his prosthetics.

''That's how our family is,'' says the Woodlyn, Pa., veteran. ''We always take care of our own.''

The government says it does too, and with some truth. Of 1.4 million U.S. forces deployed for Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 185,000 have sought care from the VA -- a number that could easily top 700,000 eventually, predicts one academic analysis. The VA has already treated more than 52,000 for PTSD symptoms alone, a presidential commission finds.

Veteran John Waltz, of Hebron, Ky., blames his post-traumatic stress disorder on his rescue work at a plane crash aboard a carrier bound for an Iraqi tour. While his condition and disability claim were evaluated, he ran up about $12,000 worth of medical bills, he says. Despite Social Security and his wife's work, the couple's yearly income was cut in half to $30,000.

''We have to be really frugal, as far as what groceries we buy,'' Waltz says. ''I think we're down to just a couple dollars now, until the next time we get paid.''

On a national scale, the costs of caring for the wounded certainly won't crush the $13 trillion annual American economy. It probably won't bankrupt the VA, which already treats more than 5.5 million patients each year. But the price tag will challenge budgets of governments and service agencies, adding another hungry mouth within their nests.

Economic forecasts vary widely for the federal costs of caring for injured veterans returning from the Middle East, but they range as high as $700 billion for the VA. That would rival the cost of fighting the Iraq war. In recent years, the VA has repeatedly run out of money to care for sick veterans and has had to ask for billions more before the next budget.

''I wouldn't be surprised if these costs per person are higher than any war previously,'' says Scott Wallsten, of the conservative think tank Progress and Freedom Foundation.

The costs often fall on veterans and their families. Ted Wade, of Chapel Hill, N.C., can't drive or keep his memories straight since a bomb tore off an arm, hurt his foot, and wracked his brain in an attack on his Humvee in Iraq. He and his wife have had to lower their living standard and accept house payments from parents.

''I can't work because he can't be up here by himself,'' says his wife, Sarah. ''It's my volunteer work, is what it really comes down to.''

Yet federal officials say the cost of this wounded influx isn't hurting the quality of care promised to veterans.

At a recent ribbon cutting, the Army's vice chief of staff, Gen. Richard Cody, trumpeted a new rehab center for amputees as ''proof that when it comes to making good on such an important promise, there is no bottom line.''

Since President Bush took office, medical spending for veterans has risen by 83 percent, says White House budget spokesman Sean Kevelighan. However, that includes the increased numbers of all veterans treated -- not just the wave returning from the Middle East.

''The president has made his dedication very clear to troops in the field and after,'' the spokesman said.

The VA didn't respond to several requests for comment. Recently, though, outgoing chief Jim Nicholson acknowledged trouble keeping up with the pace of disability claims.

But earlier this year, he also insisted that veterans ''will invariably tell you they are really getting good care from the VA.''

------

Not invariably.

The VA takes the lead in treating wounds and paying for disabilities of veterans. And it usually does a good job of handling major, known wounds, especially in the early months, by many accounts. The military, Social Security Administration, Labor Department and other agencies add important federal benefits.

However, many veterans and families say the VA often restricts rehabilitation or cuts it off too quickly.

Former Army Ranger Jeremy Feldbusch, of Blairsville, Pa., was blinded and brain-injured by artillery shrapnel in Iraq, but he and his mother decided to get some care outside the VA. His mother, Charlene, says some specialists, especially brain experts, are better in the private sector.

Insurance for major injuries is available at low cost to service members. It pays out up to $100,000 to help cover costs of rehabilitation. But many think it isn't enough.

In Odessa, Fla., the family of John Barnes decided to save most of his $100,000 payout.

They could easily have spent more of it. His mother, Valerie Wallace, estimates her expenses at more than $35,000 to help care for him while he deals with a brain injury and paralysis from a mortar attack on a base outside Baghdad. She took time off from her nursing job, paid $17 an hour for a home health aide, and transported her son to countless rounds of therapy.

Still, she wanted to preserve his insurance money. ''John's going to need that money down the road,'' she says. Instead, she stopped saving, closed out investments, and borrowed against her own insurance.

Disability payments supply monthly income to the wounded, but the VA focuses on replacing lost earnings. A presidential commission has recommended broader compensation for lost quality of life -- a concept in line with civilian law. Co-chair Donna Shalala, a former U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services, estimates that the committee's package of recommendations would cost at least several hundred million dollars.

In Oceanside, Calif., Joshua Elmore, says his $1,200-a-month disability payments aren't ''even coming close'' to replacing what he's lost. A rocket attack on a Marine base in Iraq shattered his arm bones and left other injuries.

He can still do yard work, odd jobs, and go to culinary school. But Elmore, who has two little girls, complains that he can't run and sometimes limps when he walks.

Some wounded veterans turn to private health insurance and other programs outside the federal government, swelling costs for states and towns. Sean Lunde, an Iraq veteran at the Massachusetts Department of Veterans' Services, says his agency rushes emergency funds to some wounded veterans.

Service nonprofits also pay for emergency shelter, housing, job training, food, clothing and transportation for wounded veterans who risk slipping into coverage gaps.

T.J. Cantwell, of Rebuilding Together, says his group puts an average of $20,000 -- plus donated supplies and labor -- into houses it modifies for injured soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Rosedale, Md., the group added handrails, new light switches and door knobs, a garage door opener, and other improvements to the home of Army Sgt. 1st Class Juanita Wilson. The 33-year-old mother of two lost part of her arm in a homemade bomb blast in Iraq, but she remains on active duty to preserve her retirement.

Meanwhile, she says of the remodeling job, ''If I had to pay for it, probably very little would be done.''

Despite all this help, many families drop tens of thousands of dollars on travel to hospitals, stays in hotel rooms, extra therapies, and on making their homes and vehicles accessible to the disabled. Intent on the best care, parents sometimes quit jobs and lose their own health insurance.

Denise Mettie, of Selah, Wash., and her husband have been living ''paycheck to paycheck'' while she helps in the recovery of her son, Evan. A car bomb in Iraq propelled shrapnel into his brain, and he can no longer walk or talk. His mother gave up her $30,000-a-year bank job and had to buy health insurance for herself and her two daughters, just to watch over her son's hospital treatment, she says.

''What the VA has to offer is insufficient economically to take care of the impact of what happens,'' says psychologist Michael Wagner, founder of the nonprofit U.S. Welcome Home Foundation and a retired Army medical officer.

Veterans groups finally sued the VA a few months ago, seeking quicker medical care and disability payments for those with PTSD. They claim that the crush of shattered troops has sent the agency into a ''virtual meltdown.''

Last week, the VA challenged the lawsuit on technical grounds. Its lawyers also argued that even though VA rules commit to two years of free care, that depends upon Congress setting aside enough money.

------

Upset by his visits with wounded veterans, defense hawk Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who chairs a defense spending subcommittee, dropped his support for the Iraq war in 2005.

Speaking of the wounded, he now says federal officials are ''not taking care of the things they should and ... we're trying to change the direction.''

Many recommendations have come from veterans, federal advisers and others. Some involve quicker and heftier disability benefits. And nearly everyone begs for more VA money and staff for medical treatment, though few specify where they'd find extra resources.

Rep. Chris Carney, D-Pa., a military reservist, is promoting a bill to set mandatory annual spending levels for veterans' health care. Prospects are unclear.

Either way, it may be too late for veterans like Awad, who nervously awaits the approach of imagined enemies around what was once his castle.

------

EDITOR'S NOTE: Jeff Donn reported from Temicula, Calif. Kimberly Hefling reported from Woodlyn, Pa.; Harrington, Del.; and Washington, D.C.

    Wounded Vets Also Suffer Financial Woes, NYT, 29.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Coming-Home-Wounded-The-Price.html

Marines Probed in Alleged Captive Deaths

September 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:49 p.m. ET
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Nearly three years after the battle of Fallujah earned Marines more Navy Cross medals for heroism than any other action in Iraq, prosecutors are investigating whether members of one squad killed a group of captured insurgents there.

However, getting charges to stick could prove difficult as prosecutors try to assemble concrete evidence from a battle that reduced much of the city to rubble and caused extensive casualties. The identities of the victims are unknown.

Several Marines from Camp Pendleton are under investigation and the former squad leader, now a civilian, has been charged in federal court with two counts of voluntary manslaughter.

About 130 Marines were killed during the 53-day battle, more than were 1,000 wounded and some 1,000 insurgents were killed, said a Marine Corps spokesman, Lt. Col. Chris Hughes. There is no tally of civilian deaths.

''It's a little bit difficult to take a firefight three years after the fight and try to piece together whether or not a crime took place,'' said Doug Applegate, an attorney for Jose Nazario Jr., the former squad leader. ''No crime scene could have been preserved, there's no physical evidence or DNA.''

Nazario, 27, who has left the Marine Corps, pleaded not guilty earlier this month in federal court in Riverside.

Recent cases against Marines over actions in Iraq highlight the challenges prosecutors face. Charges against eight Marines in the killing of an Iraqi man last year in Hamdania resulted in only one murder conviction, despite confessions and testimony from several of the defendants. And prosecutors have yet to score any convictions against Marines accused in the killings of 24 civilians in Haditha.

Observers say it will be even tougher to prosecute the members of a squad from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines in the Fallujah case.

There are no forensics, the building where the shootings supposedly took place was destroyed and the identity of the victims is unknown, lawyers for some of the squad members said. Prosecutors identify the men Nazario is accused of shooting only as ''human beings'' called John Doe No. 1 and John Doe No. 2.

Already, the officer overseeing the case has dismissed a murder charge against one squad member, Sgt. Jermaine Nelson, so he can review the evidence.

The investigation was triggered when a former corporal from the squad, Ryan Weemer, applied for a job with the Secret Service. Investigators claim he described the killings during a polygraph test that included a question about whether he had participated in a wrongful death, according to his attorney, Paul Hackett. Weemer has not been charged with any crime.

The complaint against Nazario says that after coming under fire from a house in Fallujah, the squad entered the building and captured several insurgents, Nazario placed a call on his radio.

''Nazario said that he was asked 'Are they dead yet?''' the complaint states. When Nazario responded that the captives were alive, he was told by a Marine on the radio to ''make it happen,'' the complaint says.

Applegate has said investigators were looking into the actions of the Marine who allegedly spoke with Nazario on the radio.

Lawyers say it is highly unusual for civilian prosecutors to go after a former U.S. serviceman for an alleged war crime. Kevin McDermott, another of Nazario's lawyers, said prosecutors employed a little-used 2000 law written primarily to prosecute civilian contractors who commit crimes while working for the U.S. overseas.

McDermott said he knew of only one other veteran, former Army Pvt. Steven D. Green, who is charged in civilian court. Green is accused of raping and murdering a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killing members of her family. He faces trial in Kentucky, and if convicted could get a death sentence.

If Nazario's case goes to trial, Applegate said he would educate a civilian jury about the realities of combat.

''How do you convey to a jury confusion in the fog of war?'' Applegate said. ''We are going to have to convey that a guy who might cross the street under a white flag on your block might shoot your best friend on the next block.''

Marine, Army and Iraqi units entered Fallujah on Nov. 9, 2004, and faced some of the heaviest fighting seen so far in the war in Iraq, often engaging in hand-to-hand combat.

Of more than 20 Navy Cross medals awarded for combat heroism in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least eight were earned in Fallujah, according to several online sources. A Navy Cross is second only to a Medal of Honor.

Weemer's attorney, Hackett, a Marine reserve major, says it is unlikely that anyone who has never seen combat could grasp what Marines experienced in Fallujah.

''I remember the first day seeing a dog run down the street with an arm in its mouth. Dogs, cats eating bodies. Those are the kinds of scenes that a Marine is experiencing,'' Hackett said.

''You take a 22-year-old American, you shoot at him all day long, you deprive him of sleep, you make him see his buddies being killed, he has their blood on his boots and blouse, and when you don't see perfection in his decisions you court-martial him? It's absurd.''

    Marines Probed in Alleged Captive Deaths, NYT, 29.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Marines-Fallujah.html

Weary G.I.’s in Iraq Are Ready for a Rest, but Are Hardly at Ease

September 30, 2007
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

MAHMUDIYA, Iraq — On bases big and small south of Baghdad, the scrambled reality of war has become routine: an unending loop of anxious driving in armored Humvees, gallons of Gatorade, laughter at the absurd and 4 a.m. raids into intimate Iraqi bedrooms.

This is Iraq for the 3,300 soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division’s Second Brigade, and many have bitterly come to the realization that it now feels more like home than home will.

No other brigade in the Army has spent more days deployed since Sept. 11, 2001. And with only a few weeks to go before ending their 15-month tour, the soldiers here are eager to go. But they are also nervous about what their minds will carry back given the psychic toll of war day after day and the prospect of additional tours.

Heartache can be heard in the quiet voice of Specialist Gerald Barranco-Oro, who at 22 is on his second tour of Iraq and will leave for home without two close friends who were killed May 19.

There are other losses, too: for fathers like Staff Sgt. Kirk Ray, 25, whose 2-year-old daughter screams when he calls because “she doesn’t know who I am”; and for those who must detach to keep going, like Specialist Jesse Herb, 20, who casually mentioned recently that the ceiling above his bed was dented with the bone fragments of a lieutenant who shot and killed himself there a few months ago.

“Every day I wake up,” he said, “I see little pieces of his head.”

Most of the soldiers accept their lot. Shaped by experience, they fit in here. Re-enlistment rates across the brigade are running above the Army’s goals, and soldiers in six platoons said in interviews that they still loved their jobs: the camaraderie, the sense of mission, the ability to play a role in history.

It also helps, they said, that they will head back to Fort Drum in New York with a sense of accomplishment. Several thousand Iraqi volunteers are now working alongside the Americans to fight Sunni Islamic extremists, and once hostile villages in their area have quieted down.

But even if the gains last — and many soldiers consider them fragile — the consequences continue to add up. From the Second Brigade’s 2004-2005 deployment until now, at least 82 soldiers from the brigade and its attached units have been killed in combat in Iraq. Two others, Specialist Alex R. Jimenez, 25, and Pvt. Byron W. Fouty, 19, are still missing after being kidnapped in an ambush on May 12.

Each case is more than a statistic. It is a catastrophe, devastating dozens and inflicting emotional wounds.

Units recover but burdens remain, especially for soldiers who must step in for the departed. Sgt. Ryan McDonald, 21, for example, filled the squad leader position held by his friend Sgt. Justin D. Wisniewski, 22, who was killed May 19 when he stepped on a pressure-detonated bomb on a trail of soft dirt near Latafiya.

The two young men came up together, studying tactics, sharing drinks at home and competing in Battery A, Task Force 2-15, a field artillery unit based in Mahmudiya. When Sergeant Wisniewski died, Sergeant McDonald was only a few feet away. In the aftermath, he cursed in anger but still managed to console another severely wounded soldier with four words: “I love you, man.”

Recently, Sergeant McDonald found himself near the spot again, leading soldiers through another area littered with bombs on footpaths. He initially played tough when asked about his friend’s death. “You deal with it,” he said, leaning on the brick wall of a house his men were searching.

But he later softened. After warning soldiers away from soft dirt, he said that correcting them always made him think of Sergeant Wisniewski.

“He was tough,” Sergeant McDonald said.

Specialist Barranco-Oro remembered him as a joker, a wiry leader from Standish, Mich., who was nicknamed Ski. He had been close not just with Sergeant Wisniewski but also another soldier shot that same day by a sniper, Pfc. Matthew Bean of Pembroke, Mass.

Private Bean later died. Specialist Barranco-Oro, a medic, said he still wished he could have been there to help. He was in another patrol area at the time.

The shock, he said, has flooded back as his return home approaches. “You would never, never think one of your friends won’t be there with you,” Specialist Barranco-Oro said. “Never.”

“You make so many plans: ‘We’re gonna go to Bean’s wedding and live it up; we’re going to Standish with Ski and go hunting and to party it up.’”

He leaned forward and stared straight ahead.

“We’ll still go see the families and stuff,” he said. “But it’s going to be different.”

His friends live on through his grief. Songs jog memories. He said he might get a tattoo of their names “so they won’t be forgotten,” and in the meantime, he said, he talked to God about them every night.

“You wouldn’t think it would stay with you this long,” he said.

In fact, going home often creates another cycle of grief, said Lt. Col. Reagon P. Carr, the behavioral health officer for the Second Brigade. Many soldiers return feeling not just down but also guilty for having survived, Colonel Carr said.

The Army screens returning soldiers for post-traumatic stress disorder and other signs of trouble, but for many, the struggle has already begun. During one recent week, Colonel Carr said, he met with 3 soldiers contemplating suicide, 12 who could not sleep, 5 who feared returning to a dysfunctional marriage and 16 who said they were disgruntled about their leadership.

“A lot of soldiers here, from what they’ve seen or witnessed, will go back very on edge,” he said. “It is a cumulative effect, especially when you have a short time between deployments.”

The challenge for most consists of figuring out “how to keep Iraq in Iraq and how to keep home at home,” said Capt. Rich West, the chaplain in Mahmudiya.

Several soldiers said they feared free time at home and the thoughts that might arise. Few have told their families the details of what they have seen, or how accustomed they have become to a surreal routine with no 9 to 5, no errands, no bills, no diapers — just a series of moments that snap from frightening to odd, and then back again.

On one recent patrol near Abu Ghraib, for instance, a group of Second Brigade soldiers received wet kisses from a barefoot old woman with tattoos as they searched her backyard for nitric acid that could be used in explosives.

A few days later, during a clearing operation west of Mahmudiya, Sergeant McDonald’s platoon discovered a bearded Iraqi man whose right ankle was chained to a rusty engine block. Dazed and sitting outside, he looked like a victim of Sunni insurgents. The soldiers immediately tensed, weapons ready, until an older man identified himself as the prisoner’s uncle and the man who shackled him.

“He’s crazy,” the uncle said.

Stunned looks appeared all around. “Joe, is he crazy?” the platoon leader asked his interpreter.

When the interpreter answered yes, the soldiers could only laugh. The tension was released.

The war here, as it continues on and on, can be banal, a groove well-worn by a shared sense of humor and knowing glances that say “only in Iraq, only in Iraq.”

Detachment comes and goes. As Colonel Carr said, his treatment in the field must be limited; soldiers are taught to cope so they can go out and do their jobs.

Most do, and do it well. Specialist Herb, a member of the unit searching for nitric acid, said that when he moved into his trailer in July, his trailer’s blinds were still spotted with dried blood from the lieutenant who killed himself. After cleaning the mess, he said, he now sleeps just fine. “Me and my roommate flipped for who was going to live on that side,” he said, sitting behind the wheel of a grumbling Humvee. “I lost.”

With their tolerance for war increased, many soldiers say they feel stronger, having faced a test and passed. Their families may ultimately be the ones left out, as they try to connect with loved ones forever changed.

This is exactly what many soldiers fear. For Sergeant Ray, who has spent a total of about 30 months in Iraq with the Second Brigade and other units, this deployment has been particularly tough. He and his wife have been deployed since last summer; he patrols south of Baghdad, she works in Mosul, in the north. As a result, his 7-year-old stepson and 2-year-old daughter now live with their grandparents in New Jersey.

He still loves the Army, valuing the work, the brotherhood of his platoon and the military’s promise of financial stability, he said. His wife will get out soon, however, and he cannot help wondering about the war’s effect on his daughter.

“I think she’s just confused,” he said, as the sun set on the date palms south of Baghdad. “She’s right at that age. She turned 2 in August, so she’s just starting to talk and realize what’s going on. And neither one of us is there.”

Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York.

    Weary G.I.’s in Iraq Are Ready for a Rest, but Are Hardly at Ease, NYT, 29.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/world/middleeast/30mahmudiya.html?hp

Iraq: Sectarian Violence Kills 18

September 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:03 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Three Iraqi soldiers and three civilians, killed in a suicide truck bombing near Mosul, were among 18 victims of sectarian violence across Iraq Saturday, even as the country's leaders denounced a U.S. Senate proposal to split the country into ethnic or religious-based regions.

Six people were killed and 17 wounded after a bomber in a pickup truck detonated his explosives as Iraqi forces chased the speeding vehicle near Mosul, an army officer said.

Acting on a tip, a team of Iraqi soldiers tried to intercept the suicide driver as he was heading west from Mazra village toward Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad. As the Iraqi Humvee neared the truck, the driver detonated his explosive payload, according to the officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

Also Saturday, drive-by gunmen killed a Sunni sheik near his home in Mosul's Mithaq neighborhood, said police spokesman Abdul Karim al-Jbouri. Sheik Ghanim Qassim was a mosque preacher and member of Mosul's edict commission, a religious rule-making body.

Al-Jbouri also said a 50-year-old journalist visiting his brother in the Bab al-Baidh neighborhood in central Mosul was killed about 9:30 a.m. when he was caught in a mortar attack. Abdul-Khaliq Nasir, who worked for Um al-Rabyain, a local newspaper, until it ceased operations about six months ago because of security concerns, was married and had three children.

In central Baghdad, gunmen opened fire at an Iraqi checkpoint, killing one civilian and wounding four others, police said.

Late Friday, the U.S. military handed over nine decomposing bodies to a hospital in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, according to a police official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

The young men were insurgents killed by U.S. forces, he said, adding that U.S. military officials told the hospital to expect at least 15 more bodies in the coming days.

The U.S. military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Earlier Friday, Iraq's prime minister told The Associated Press that a U.S. Senate proposal to split the country into regions according to religious or ethnic divisions would be a ''catastrophe.''

The Kurds in three northern Iraqi provinces are running a virtually independent country within Iraq, while nominally maintaining relations with Baghdad. They support a formal division. But both Sunni and Shiite Muslims have reacted with extreme opposition to the U.S. Senate proposal.

The majority Shiites, who would retain control of major oil revenues under a division of the country, oppose the measure because it would diminish the territorial integrity of Iraq, which they now control. Sunnis would control an area with few if any oil resources. Kurds have major oil reserves in their territory.

The nonbinding Senate resolution calls for Iraq to be divided into federal regions under control of the three communities in a power-sharing agreement similar to the one that ended the 1990s war in Bosnia. Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Joseph Biden was a prime sponsor of the measure.

''It is an Iraqi affair dealing with Iraqis,'' Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told the AP Friday on a return flight to Baghdad from New York, where he appeared at the U.N. General Assembly. ''Iraqis are eager for Iraq's unity. ... Dividing Iraq is a problem, and a decision like that would be a catastrophe.''

The comments were al-Maliki's first since the measure passed the Senate on Wednesday.

Iraq's constitution lays down a federal system, allowing Shiites in the south, Kurds in the north and Sunnis in the center and west of the country to set up regions with considerable autonomous powers.

Nevertheless, ethnic and sectarian turmoil have snarled hopes of negotiating such measures, especially given deep divisions on sharing the country's vast oil resources. Oil reserves and existing fields would fall mainly into the hands of Kurds and Shiites if such a division were to occur.

So far there has been no agreement on a broader sharing of those revenues, one of the several U.S.-mandated benchmarks the government has failed to push through parliament.

    Iraq: Sectarian Violence Kills 18, NYT, 29.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

In Iraq, the Privatized Guns of War

September 29, 2007
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Hired Gun Fetish,” by Paul Krugman (column, Sept. 28):

I am writing to express my grave concern with the use of private security contractors in Iraq. This Bush administration move to privatize the military is a grievous and immoral mistake. It has serious implications for the future of both foreign and domestic policy.

If the United States is pursuing legitimate national security goals in a foreign country, in actions in which people risk death and are being authorized to kill for the sake of our nation, our military must take responsibility for and be in complete charge of all the forces involved. The president must be the commander in chief, not the contractor in chief.

And Congress must step up to openly authorize payment and include the expenses in the budget, not defer the financial burden to the next generation through weak-willed acquiescence to an executive out of control.

Congress is abdicating its constitutional and moral authority in this matter. If the employees of organizations like Blackwater USA want to serve their country, let them sign on with the armed forces. John Varner

Amherst, Mass., Sept. 28, 2007

•

To the Editor:

In his farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of a “military-industrial complex” that threatened the best interests of our nation. But the recent events in Iraq surrounding Blackwater USA have illustrated a tantamount danger to America’s reputation and interests.

For just as the increased use of hired mercenaries signaled the decline of the Roman Empire, so, too, does our ceding of the military conflict to private firms mark an ominous sign for our investment in our nation’s affairs. Only the return of a peacetime draft will make all Americans bear the true costs of war, leading us ultimately to demand the end of this senseless conflict.

Hayden Kantor

Chicago, Sept. 28, 2007

•

To the Editor:

Paul Krugman details the disastrous use of mercenaries in Iraq, and correctly notes that this is consistent with the administration’s efforts to outsource government functions. What he doesn’t note is that this administration, which prides itself on its business acumen, is violating a central principle of outsourcing. You never outsource your core competencies. It is difficult to think of anything that is a core competency of the federal government more than national defense. Bill Bailey

Atlanta, Sept. 28, 2007

•

To the Editor:

Re “State Dept. Tallies 56 Shootings Involving Blackwater on Diplomatic Guard Duty” (news article, Sept. 28):

The apparent privatization of the time-honored tradition for the United States Marines to protect our embassies and diplomats in Iraq and Afghanistan and who knows where else is simply abhorrent. The use of unregulated hired guns to protect vital national interests is simply another indicator of the profit motive that keeps this war blazing.

Carlos Solis

Weston, Fla., Sept. 28, 2007

•

To the Editor:

“The Deadly Game of Private Security” (Week in Review, Sept. 23) calls the work that private security guards do in Iraq “indispensable”; however, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the private guards themselves are irreplaceable.

I have seen them up close in both Iraq and Afghanistan for extended periods of time, and I can state with complete confidence that members of our armed forces could do the same job just as well or better, and for far less money.

One of the worst legacies left by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been the privatization of our military presence overseas, not only because of issues like potential corruption and lack of accountability, but also for the damage it has wreaked on the ideal of the American citizen soldier. The sooner these private armies are put out of business, the better.

Rob Schultheis

Telluride, Colo., Sept. 23, 2007

    In Iraq, the Privatized Guns of War, NYT, 29.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/29/opinion/l29iraq.html

State Dept. Tallies 56 Shootings Involving Blackwater on Diplomatic Guard Duty

September 28, 2007
The New York times
By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 — The State Department said Thursday that Blackwater USA security personnel had been involved in 56 shootings while guarding American diplomats in Iraq so far this year. It was the first time the Bush administration had made such data public.

Blackwater, a large, privately held security contractor based in North Carolina, provided security to diplomats on 1,873 convoy runs in Iraq so far this year, and its personnel fired weapons 56 times, according to a written statement by Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte.

The State Department did not release comparable 2007 numbers for other security companies, but the new Blackwater numbers show a far higher rate of shootings per convoy mission than were experienced in 2006 by one of the company’s primary competitors, DynCorp International. DynCorp reported 10 cases in about 1,500 convoy runs last year.

The New York Times reported Thursday that Blackwater’s rate of shootings was at least twice as high as the rates for other companies providing similar services to the State Department in Iraq.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has asked Mr. Negroponte to oversee the department’s response to problems with security contractors.

A government official who was briefed on an hourlong meeting involving State Department officials on Thursday morning said that Ms. Rice had appeared surprised at the report that Blackwater had been involved in a higher rate of shootings than its competitors.

“She needs to be convinced that Blackwater’s hands are clean,” the government official said. Ms. Rice was also said to be taken aback by pressure from Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who issued an angry letter to her this week complaining about what he saw as the State Department’s efforts to block his panel’s investigation into Blackwater.

The meeting on Thursday with Ms. Rice seems to signal that the State Department’s leaders now recognize that the Blackwater issue is more serious than they had first thought, and that it may become harder for the Bush administration to defend Blackwater and allow the company to retain its prominent role in providing diplomatic security in Iraq.

Since the Sept. 16 shooting in the streets of Baghdad involving an American convoy guarded by Blackwater that left at least eight Iraqis dead, the Bush administration has fended off public demands by the Iraqi government for Blackwater to be evicted from the country.

Instead, the administration has said that it will conduct an investigation jointly with the Iraqis into the shooting, while American government officials have repeatedly indicated that they do not believe that the White House or the State Department would force Blackwater out of the contract.

The Pentagon said on Wednesday that it had sent a team to Iraq to investigate the role of security contractors there, in what appeared to be an effort to put private contractors under greater control by the United States military. The State Department quickly joined the Pentagon, and said that it would also send a team to review the role of contractors in Iraq.

Separately, a new study issued Thursday by Mr. Waxman’s oversight committee was highly critical of the company’s performance in a 2004 case in which four Blackwater contractors were killed in the restive Anbar Province city of Falluja. The committee concluded that witness accounts and investigative reports conflicted with Blackwater’s assertion that its contractors had been sent to Falluja “with sufficient preparation and equipment.”

In a statement, Blackwater said that the committee’s report was “a one-sided version of this tragic incident.”

“What the report fails to acknowledge is that the terrorists determined what happened that fateful day in 2004,” Blackwater said. ”The terrorists were intent on killing Americans and desecrating their bodies.”

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

   
State Dept. Tallies 56 Shootings Involving Blackwater on Diplomatic Guard Duty, YT,2888889.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/world/middleeast/28contractors.html

U.S. Needs ‘Long-Term Presence’ in Iraq, Gates Says

September 27, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told Congress on Wednesday that he envisioned keeping five combat brigades in Iraq as a “long-term presence.”

Mr. Gates told the Senate Appropriations Committee, “When I speak of a long-term presence, I’m thinking of a very modest U.S. presence with no permanent bases, where we can continue to go after Al Qaeda in Iraq and help the Iraqi forces.”

He added that “in my head” he envisioned a force as a quarter of the current combat brigades.

There are now 20 combat brigades in the country, a number that is scheduled to drop to 15 by next summer. Mr. Gates has previously expressed hope that if security conditions in the country continue to improve, force levels in Iraq could drop to 10 brigades by the end of 2008.

Mr. Gates gave no timetable for reaching that force level or for how long the forces would be required to stay. He added that there had been no detailed planning by the Pentagon about what level of forces would be required on a more or less permanent basis.

A combat brigade has 3,500 to 4,500 soldiers, leaving a minimum of 17,500 combat troops in Iraq under the plan Mr. Gates described. The total American force required would probably end up being at least twice that, because of the need for support troops and other related personnel.

Mr. Gates also laid out at the hearing a Bush administration request for an added $42 billion for war-related expenses in 2008. The request increases to nearly $190 billion the amount the Bush administration is seeking for 2008 to finance military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In February, the administration asked for $141.7 billion for the wars, an amount that officials said at the time was an estimate that could increase.

The Appropriations Committee chairman, Senator Robert C. Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia, responded with blistering criticism of the administration’s Iraq strategy and warned that his panel would not “rubber stamp” Mr. Bush’s requests for war financing.

“The president and his supporters claim that we’re now finally on the cusp of progress and that we must continue to stay the course,” Mr. Byrd said. “I’ve heard that before. Call me a skeptic, but we have heard this tune before. Yes, haven’t we?”

Antiwar protesters in the hearing room responded with cries of “Yes! Yes!”

Mr. Byrd later had the room cleared of protesters after they disrupted an answer by Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Mr. Gates said $11 billion of the requested money was for building 15,000 heavily armored vehicles designed to better withstand the roadside bombs that cause the majority of American casualties in Iraq.

The Pentagon also seeks $9 billion to repair and refit American equipment stocks. The administration is also requesting $1 billion to train Iraqi security forces, bringing the total 2008 request for training funds to $5.7 billion.

But Mr. Gates said that American troops, “under some of the most trying conditions, have done far more than what was asked of them, and far more than what was expected.”

    U.S. Needs ‘Long-Term Presence’ in Iraq, Gates Says, NYT, 27.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/washington/27military.html

Pentagon Seeks $190 Billion for Wars

September 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:56 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates will ask Congress Wednesday to approve nearly $190 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008, increasing initial projections by more than a third.

In remarks prepared for a Senate hearing, Gates says the extra money is necessary to buy vehicles that can protect troops against roadside bombs, refurbish equipment worn down by combat and consolidate U.S. bases in Iraq. A copy of the remarks was obtained by The Associated Press.

In that prepared testimony, Gates said, ''I know that Iraq and other difficult choices America faces in the war on terror will continue to be a source of friction within the Congress, between the Congress and the president and in the wider public debate.''

''Considering this, I would like to close with a word about something I know we can all agree on -- the honor, courage and great sense of duty we have witnessed in our troops since September 11th,'' his testimony said.

In February, Bush requested $141.7 billion for the wars; officials said at the time the figure was only a rough estimate and could climb. In July, the Defense Department asked Congress for another $5.3 billion to buy 1,500 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles.

Gates says another $42 billion is needed to cover additional requirements. The extra money includes:

-- $11 billion to field another 7,000 MRAP vehicles in addition to the 8,000 already planned;

-- $9 billion to reconstitute equipment and technology;

-- $6 billion for training and equipment of troops;

-- $1 billion to improve U.S. facilities in the region and consolidate bases in Iraq; and

-- $1 billion to train and equip Iraqi security forces.

    Pentagon Seeks $190 Billion for Wars, NYT, 26.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq.html

U.S. Snipers Accused of 'Baiting' Iraqis

September 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:49 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Army snipers hunting insurgents in Iraq were under orders to ''bait'' their targets with suspicious materials, such as detonation cords, and then kill whoever picked up the items, according to the defense attorney for a soldier accused of planting evidence on an Iraqi he killed. Gary Myers, an attorney for Sgt. Evan Vela, said his client had acted ''pursuant to orders.''

''We believe that our client has done nothing more than he was instructed to do by superiors,'' Myers said in a telephone interview.

Myers and Vela's father, Curtis Carnahan of Idaho Falls, Idaho, said in separate interviews that sworn statements and testimony in the cases of two other accused Ranger snipers indicate that the Army has a classified program that encourages snipers to ''bait'' potential targets and then kill whoever takes the bait.

The Army on Monday declined to confirm such a program exists.

''To prevent the enemy from learning about our tactics, techniques and training procedures, we don't discuss specific methods targeting enemy combatants,'' said Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman.

Boyce also said there are no classified programs that authorize the murder of Iraqi civilians or the use of ''drop weapons'' to make killings appeared to be legally justified, which is what Vela and the two other snipers are accused of doing.

The transcript of a court hearing for two of the three accused snipers makes several references to the existence of a classified ''baiting'' program but provides few details of how it works. A copy of the transcript was provided to The Associated Press by Vela's father.

The Washington Post, which first reported the existence of the ''baiting'' program, cited the sworn statement of Capt. Matthew P. Didier, the leader of a Ranger sniper scout platoon.

''Baiting is putting an object out there that we know they will use, with the intention of destroying the enemy,'' Didier said in the statement. ''Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it. If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against U.S. forces.''

The Post said the program was devised by the Army's Asymmetric Warfare Group, which advises commanders on more effective methods in today's unconventional conflicts, including ways to combat roadside bombs.

Within months of the ''baiting'' program's introduction, three snipers in Didier's platoon were charged with murder for allegedly using those items and others to make shootings seem legitimate, according to the Post.

The Post said that although it doesn't appear that the three alleged shootings were specifically part of the classified program, defense attorneys argue that the program may have encouraged them by blurring the legal lines in a complex war zone.

The court martial of one of the accused soldiers, Spec. Jorge Sandoval Jr., is scheduled to begin in Baghdad on Wednesday. Also facing premeditated murder charges are Vela and Staff Sgt. Michael Hensley.

They are part of the Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division, based at Fort Richardson, Alaska.

    U.S. Snipers Accused of 'Baiting' Iraqis, NYT, 25.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq-Snipers.html

Bomber Strikes Shiite - Sunni Meeting

September 24, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:32 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- A suicide bomber struck a reconciliation meeting of Shiite and Sunni tribal leaders and senior provincial officials in Baqouba on Monday, killing at least 15 people, including the city's police chief, security officials said.

A witness said most of the people killed or wounded were in the mosque yard washing their hands or drinking tea after taking a break from the meeting for the iftar banquet, the daily meal to break the sunrise-to-sunset fast during the holy month of Ramadan.

The bombing, which bore the hallmarks of al-Qaida in Iraq, was a challenge to the U.S. strategy of turning members of both Islamic sects against extremists in a bid to duplicate the success in Anbar province to the west of the capital.

The U.S. military has claimed recent success in quelling violence in Baqouba by sending thousands of additional American and Iraqi troops to the area, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. The meeting of tribal leaders and clerics from both Islamic sects was aimed at reducing sectarian tension and discussing ways to support security forces against insurgents.

The attacker detonated his explosives vest about 8:30 p.m. as guards searched him at the entrance to a Shiite mosque as many meeting participants were waiting to get back into the building.

Baqouba's police chief Brig. Gen. Ali Dalyan and the Diyala provincial operations chief Brig. Gen. Najib al-Taie were near the bomber and were among the 15 killed, according to the security and health officials.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to release the information, also said 28 people were wounded, including several other senior provincial leaders.

In a separate attack, a suicide truck bomber struck an Iraqi checkpoint near the northern city of Tal Afar, killing three security forces and three civilians and wounding 16 other people, said Mayor Najim Abdullah.

Also Monday, Iran closed major border crossings with northeastern Iraq on Monday to protest the U.S. detention of an Iranian official the military accused of weapons smuggling, a Kurdish official said.

Five border gates were closed starting Sunday night and continuing Monday morning, leaving travelers and cargo stranded, according to officials and witnesses.

The move threatens the economy of Iraq's northern region -- one of the country's few success stories -- and also appears aimed at driving a wedge between Iraq and the Americans at a time of friction over a deadly shooting in Baghdad involving the security firm Blackwater USA.

There were varying responses from Iranian officials to the border closures.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asked by The Associated Press, said the intent was to protect pilgrims.

''On an annual basis millions of Iranians visit Iraq and Iraq's holy sites for pilgrimage purposes,'' Ahmadinejad said in the interview in New York. ''Recently as a result of some clashes and the explosion of some bombs a number of Iranian civilian casualties arose. So the government has asked Iranian citizens to avoid traveling for pilgrimage purposes until security is restored. The commercial goods and freight transactions continue and the travel across the border for those purposes continue.''

However, the semiofficial Mehr news agency reported that five border points had been closed to protest the detention of the Iranian, who has been identified as Mahmudi Farhadi. He was arrested four days ago during a raid on a hotel in Sulaimaniyah, 160 miles northeast of Baghdad.

The closure will continue until Farhadi's unconditional release, the Mehr agency quoted Ismail Najjar, general governor of Iranian Kurdistan province, as saying.

Confusing matters even further, the public relations department at the Interior Ministry in Tehran said no decision had been made to shut the border.

U.S. officials said Farhadi was a member of the elite Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that smuggles weapons into Iraq. But Iraqi and Iranian leaders said he was in the country on official business and with the full knowledge of the government.

Sulaimaniyah Gov. Dana Ahmed Majeed told the AP the move affected crossing points near the border towns of Panjwin, Haj Omran, Halabja and Khanaqin. A crossing at the town of Shena had remained open, but the mayor of the nearby town of Qalat Diza, Hussein Ahmed, said that gate was closed about 10 a.m.

Darseem Ahmed, an official at the gate near Haj Omran, 225 miles northeast of Baghdad, said up to 400 trucks use that crossing point daily.

A Kurdish merchant from Sulaimaniyah said he had three trucks loaded with construction materials stuck on the Iranian side of the border near Panjwin.

''They didn't allow them to cross, they closed the gate,'' Khalid Aman Sulaiman said, expressing concern the move would cause prices of imported products to spike. He said he would consider bringing the goods across illegal routes if the border points don't open within a week.

Jamal Abdullah, a spokesman for the autonomous Kurdish government, said the Iranian move ''will have a bad effect on the economic situation of the Kurdish government and will hurt the civilians as well.''

''We are paying the price of what the Americans have done by arresting the Iranian,'' he said.

Abdullah said the regional government had asked the central government to contact Iranian officials in Baghdad to stress that Kurdish authorities had no role in the detention.

''If this closure continues it will have an effect on the historical relations between the Kurdish government and the Iranian state,'' Abdullah added.

Iran has denied U.S. allegations that it is smuggling weapons to Shiite militias in Iraq.

But the U.S. insists it has evidence to the contrary. On Monday, U.S. troops killed one suspected militant and detained four others said to be involved in kidnapping operations run by Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Baghdad's Shiite district of Sadr City, the military said.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has condemned Farhadi's arrest, saying he understood the man had been invited to Iraq.

''The government of Iraq is an elected one and sovereign. When it gives a visa, it is responsible for the visa,'' al-Maliki told the AP in an interview Sunday in New York. ''We consider the arrest ... of this individual who holds an Iraqi visa and a (valid) passport to be unacceptable.''

Last week, President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, demanded the Iranian's release and warned in a letter to America's top commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker that Iran had threatened to close its border with Iraq's Kurdish region over the case -- a move that would cause considerable damage to trade in the prosperous Kurdish region.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said Sunday that Farhadi was in charge of border transactions in western Iran and went to Iraq on an official invitation.

The U.S. military said the suspect was being questioned about ''his knowledge of, and involvement in,'' the transportation of EFPs and other roadside bombs from Iran into Iraq and his possible role in the training of Iraqi insurgents in Iran.

    Bomber Strikes Shiite - Sunni Meeting, NYT, 24.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

Iraqi Trial Witnesses Tell of Executions

September 24, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:11 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Two witnesses testified about the executions of family members in Saddam Hussein's brutal suppression of a 1991 Shiite uprising in Iran as a trial resumed Monday for former regime officials charged with crimes against humanity for their roles in the crackdown.

An elderly man recounted how soldiers rolled into his village near the southern city of Basra, shelled houses and rounded up young men.

The witness, whose testified from behind a curtain to protect his identity, said both his sons were taken away. A boy who resisted was shot, the witness said. ''I saw it with my own eyes.''

The soldiers looted his house and set it ablaze, he said.

The crackdown followed Saddam's defeat in Kuwait, when Iraqi Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north -- repressed under his Sunni-dominated regime -- staged separate uprisings that briefly seized control of 14 of the country's 18 provinces.

U.S. troops created a safe haven for Kurds in three northern provinces, preventing Saddam from attacking. But Iraqi troops crushed the other uprising in the predominantly Shiite south.

Saddam's cousin and former Defense Minister Ali Hassan al-Majid, who gained the nickname ''Chemical Ali'' after poison gas attacks on Kurdish towns in the 1980s, and 14 others are on trial for crimes against humanity.

After a month, the witness said one of his sons returned and told him the other was killed by al-Majid, as part of mass executions at a sports center. The witness did not say how his son knew these details.

The testimony provoked an outburst from al-Majid, who claimed he was not even in Basra at the time of the alleged executions.

Another witness, whose identity also was concealed, testified how soldiers took him and his father and three brothers from their southern village, also near Basra, and tortured them at a detention center for a week.

The defendants complained Monday that their lawyers were not able to attend because they were not granted U.S. protection to come to the trial. Judge Mohammed al-Khalifah al-Oreibi told them they should be satisfied with the court-appointed attorneys and that he could not authorize U.S. protection, only protection by Iraqi troops, which the lawyers had refused.

A U.S. official in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release the information, said the Americans had turned over protection duties to Iraqis who had been trained and equipped by U.S. experts.

It is the third trial involving former regime officials. The first led to the hanging of Saddam and three others after their convictions for the 1982 killings of 148 Shiites from the town of Dujail.

Al-Majid and two co-defendants -- former Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai and Hussein Rashid Mohammed, an ex-deputy director of military operations -- also have been sentenced to death in the second trial, which dealt with the killings of more than 100,000 people in the 1980s military crackdown on Kurds. But no date has been set for their executions.

    Iraqi Trial Witnesses Tell of Executions, NYT, 24.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq-Trial.html

Soldiers Describe Baiting of Insurgents in Iraq

September 24, 2007
The New York Times
By PAUL VON ZIELBAUER

Under a program developed by a Defense Department warfare unit, Army snipers have begun using a new method to kill Iraqis suspected of being insurgents, planting fake weapons and bomb-making material as bait and then killing anyone who picks up them up, according to testimony presented in a military court.

The existence of the classified “baiting program,” as it has come to be known, was disclosed as part of defense lawyers’ efforts to respond to murder charges the Army pressed this summer against three members of a Ranger sniper team. Each soldier is accused of killing an unarmed Iraqi in three separate incidents between April and June near Iskandariya.

In sworn statements, soldiers testifying for the defense have said the sniper team was employing a baiting program developed by the Pentagon’s Asymmetrical Warfare Group, which met with and gave equipment to Ranger sniper teams in Iraq in January.

The Washington Post first described the baiting program in an article Monday.

An Army spokesman, Paul Boyce, said on Monday that the Army does not discuss specific methods for “targeting enemy combatants” publicly, and that no classified program authorizes the use of “drop weapons” to make a killing appear justified.

The court martial of one of the accused soldiers, Spec. Jorge Sandoval Jr., is scheduled to begin in Baghdad on Wednesday. The two other soldiers facing premeditated murder charges are Staff Sgt. Michael Hensley, the sniper team squad leader, and Sgt. Evan Vela. All three are part of Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division, based at Fort Richardson, Alaska.

None of the three soldiers deny that they killed the three Iraqis they are charged with murdering. Through their lawyers and in court documents, the soldiers argue that the killings were legal and authorized by their superiors. A transcript of the hearing was provided by a member of an accused soldier’s family.

Snipers are among the most specialized of soldiers, using camouflage clothing and makeup to infiltrate enemy locations and high-powered rifles and scopes to stalk and kill enemy fighters. The three snipers accused of murder had for months ventured into some of the most dangerous areas of Iraq, said lawyers for Sgt. Vela.

“Snipers are special people who are trained to shoot in a detached fashion, not to see their targets as human beings,” said James D. Culp, one of Sgt. Vela’s lawyers. “Snipers have split-seconds to take shots, and he had a split second to decide whether to shoot.”

After visiting the sniper unit in Iraq, members of the Asymmetrical Warfare Group gave soldiers ammunition boxes containing so-called “drop items” like bullets, plastic explosives and bomb detonation chords to use to target Iraqis involved in insurgent activity, according to Capt. Matthew P. Didier, a sniper platoon leader who gave sworn testimony in the accused soldiers’ court hearings.

    Soldiers Describe Baiting of Insurgents in Iraq, NYT, 24.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/world/middleeast/24cnd-abuse.html?hp

U.S. says Iran sending missiles to Iraq

23 September 2007
USA Today

BAGHDAD (AP) — The U.S. military accused Iran on Sunday of smuggling surface-to-air missiles and other advanced weapons into Iraq for use against American troops. The new allegations came as Iraqi leaders condemned the latest U.S. detention of an Iranian in northern Iraq, saying the man was in their country on official business.
Military spokesman Rear Adm. Mark Fox said U.S. troops were continuing to find Iranian-supplied weaponry including the Misagh 1, a portable surface-to-air missile that uses an infrared guidance system.

Other advanced Iranian weaponry found in Iraq includes the RPG-29 rocket-propelled grenade, 240 mm rockets and armor-piercing roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, Fox said.

An American soldier was killed Saturday and another wounded when an EFP hit their patrol in eastern Baghdad, the military said.

Iran has denied U.S. allegations that it is smuggling weapons to Shiite militias in Iraq, a denial that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reiterated in an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes" aired Sunday.

"We don't need to do that. We are very much opposed to war and insecurity," said Ahmadinejad, who arrived in New York Sunday to attend the U.N. General Assembly. "The insecurity in Iraq is detrimental to our interests."

Tensions between Iran and the United States have worried Iraqi officials — many of whom are members of political parties with close ties to Tehran.

A 240 mm rocket was fired this month at the main U.S. headquarters base in Iraq, killing one person and wounding 11.

U.S. officials said the rocket was fired from a west Baghdad neighborhood controlled by Shiite militiamen.

On Thursday, U.S. troops arrested an Iranian in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah. U.S. officials said he was a member of the elite Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that smuggles weapons into Iraq.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned the Iranian's arrest, saying he understood the man, who has been identified as Mahmudi Farhadi, had been invited to Iraq.

"The government of Iraq is an elected one and sovereign. When it gives a visa, it is responsible for the visa," he told The Associated Press in an interview in New York. "We consider the arrest ... of this individual who holds an Iraqi visa and a (valid) passport to be unacceptable."

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, also demanded the Iranian's release.

The U.S. military said the suspect was being questioned about "his knowledge of, and involvement in," the transportation of EFPs and other roadside bombs from Iran into Iraq and "his facilitation of travel and training in Iran for Iraqi insurgents." The military said no decision had been made about whether to file charges.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said Farhadi was in charge of border transactions in western Iran and went to Iraq on an official invitation.

He said Iran expects the Iraqi government to provide security for Iranian nationals there and warned the arrest could affect relations between the two neighbors as well.

Iraqi authorities, meanwhile, said a shipment of chlorine had crossed the border from Jordan after concerns were raised about shortages of the chemical needed to prevent an outbreak of cholera from spreading.

Officials said earlier that as much as 100,000 tons of chlorine was being held up at the border for fear it would be hijacked and used in explosives. Several chlorine truck bombs blamed on suspected Sunni insurgents earlier this year killed scores of people.

Naeem al-Qabi, the deputy chief of Baghdad's municipal council, said warehouses in the capital were preparing to accept the chlorine, which would help purify water supplies.

"There is some administrative work needed to be done and it will be finished very soon," al-Qabi said.

Iraq now has a total of 1,652 confirmed cases of cholera after three new cases were confirmed in Salahuddin province, according to an update on the World Health Organization's website on Sunday. Earlier, cholera was confirmed in the provinces of Sulaimaniyah, Tamim and Irbil, as well as a case each in Baghdad and in Basra.

"As the weather cools and becomes more favorable for transmission, the organism is expected to spread to other provinces," the WHO's country office in Iraq said on its website.

Cholera is endemic to Iraq, with about 30 cases registered each year. The last major outbreak was in 1999, when 20 cases were discovered in one day.

Also Sunday, Iraq's minister of state for national security, Sherwan al-Waili, took over the security operations center in Basra as tensions rose in the southern city following the assassination of a local representative of Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

The region has been rocked by violence between rival Shiite militias linked to political parties, raising concerns about security as the British military has pulled back its troops from the city center to a nearby airport to allow Iraqi security forces to take over.

Al-Waili told reporters that he will temporarily head the operations center until a new security plan is implemented "very soon" in the city, 340 miles southeast of Baghdad.

    U.S. says Iran sending missiles to Iraq, UT, 23.9.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2007-09-23-iran-missiles_N.htm

U.S. Military Deaths in Iraq at 3, 795

September 22, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:40 p.m. ET
The New York Times

As of Saturday, Sept. 22, 2007, at least 3,795 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians. At least 3,095 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.

The AP count is seven higher than the Defense Department's tally, last updated Friday at 10 a.m. EDT.

The British military has reported 169 deaths; Italy, 33; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 21; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Denmark, seven; El Salvador, five; Slovakia, four; Latvia, three; Estonia, Netherlands, Thailand, two each; and Australia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Romania, South Korea, one death each.

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The latest deaths reported by the military:

-- A soldier died Saturday in a vehicle accident in Diyala province.

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The latest identifications reported by the military:

-- Army Pfc. Luigi Marciante Jr., 25, Elizabeth, N.J.; died Thursday in Muqdadiyah, of wounds sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle; assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Fort Lewis, Wash.

-- Army Spc. John J. Young, 24, Savannah, Ga.; died Friday in Camp Stryker, of injuries suffered from a non-combat related incident; assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry), Fort Drum, N.Y.

-- Army Capt. (Dr.) Roselle M. Hoffmaster, 32, Cleveland, Ohio; died Thursday in Kirkuk, of injuries sustained from a non-combat related incident; assigned to the Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, Fort Drum, N.Y.

------

On the Net:

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/ 

    U.S. Military Deaths in Iraq at 3, 795, NYT, 22.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Iraq-US-Deaths.html

The real story of Baghdad's Bloody Sunday

Six days ago, at least 28 civilians died in a shooting incident involving the US security company Blackwater.
But what actually happened? Kim Sengupta reports from the scene of the massacre

Published: 21 September 2007
The Independent

The eruption of gunfire was sudden and ferocious, round after round mowing down terrified men women and children, slamming into cars as they collided and overturned with drivers frantically trying to escape. Some vehicles were set alight by exploding petrol tanks. A mother and her infant child died in one of them, trapped in the flames.

The shooting on Sunday, by the guards of the American private security company Blackwater, has sparked one of the most bitter and public disputes between the Iraqi government and its American patrons, and brings into sharp focus the often violent conduct of the Western private armies operating in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, immune from scrutiny or prosecution.

Blackwater's security men are accused of going on an unprovoked killing spree. Hassan Jabar Salman, a lawyer, was shot four times in the back, his car riddled with eight more bullets, as he attempted to get away from their convoy. Yesterday, sitting swathed in bandages at Baghdad's Yarmukh Hospital, he recalled scenes of horror. "I saw women and children jump out of their cars and start to crawl on the road to escape being shot," said Mr Salman. "But still the firing kept coming and many of them were killed. I saw a boy of about 10 leaping in fear from a minibus, he was shot in the head. His mother was crying out for him, she jumped out after him, and she was killed. People were afraid."

At the end of the prolonged hail of bullets Nisoor Square was a scene of carnage with bodies strewn around smouldering wreckage. Ambulances trying to pick up the wounded found their path blocked by crowds fleeing the gunfire.

Yesterday, the death toll from the incident, according to Iraqi authorities, stood at 28. And it could rise higher, say doctors, as some of the injured, hit by high-velocity bullets at close quarter, are unlikely to survive.

With public anger among Iraqis showing no sign of abating, the US administration has suspended all land movement by officials outside the heavily fortified Green Zone.

The Iraqi government has revoked Blackwater's licence to operate but it still remains employed by the US government. The Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, has, however, promised a "transparent" inquiry into what happened.

Blackwater and the US State Department maintain that the guards opened fire in self-defence as they reacted to a bomb blast and then sniper fire. Amid continuing accusations and recriminations, The Independent has tried to piece together events on that day.

The reports we got from members of the public, Iraqi security personnel and government officials, as well as our own research, leads to a markedly different scenario than the American version. There was a bomb blast. But it was too far away to pose any danger to the Blackwater guards, and their State Department charges. We have found no Iraqi present at the scene who saw or heard sniper fire.

Witnesses say the first victims of the shootings were a couple with their child, the mother and infant meeting horrific deaths, their bodies fused together by heat after their car caught fire. The contractors, according to this account, also shot Iraqi soldiers and police and Blackwater then called in an attack helicopter from its private air force which inflicted further casualties.

Blackwater disputes most of this. In a statement the company declared that those killed were "armed insurgents and our personnel acted lawfully and appropriately in a war zone protecting American lives".

The day after the killings, Mirenbe Nantongo, a spokeswoman for the US embassy, said the Blackwater team had " reacted to a car bombing". The embassy's information officer, Johann Schmonsees, stressed " the car bomb was in proximity to the place where State Department personnel were meeting, and that was the reason why Blackwater responded to the incident" .

Those on the receiving end tell another story. Mr Salman said he had turned into Nisoor Square behind the Blackwater convoy when the shooting began. He recalled: "There were eight foreigners in four utility vehicles, I heard an explosion in the distance and then the foreigners started shouting and signalling for us to go back. I turned the car around and must have driven about a hundred feet when they started shooting. My car was hit with 12 bullets it turned over. Four bullets hit me in the back and another in the arm. Why they opened fire? I do not know. No one, I repeat no one, had fired at them. The foreigners had asked us to go back and I was going back in my car, so there was no reason for them to shoot."

Muhammed Hussein, whose brother was killed in the shooting, said: "My brother was driving and we saw a black convoy ahead of us. Then I saw my brother suddenly slump in the car. I dragged him out of the car and saw he had been shot in the chest. I tried to hide us both from the firing, but then I realised he was already dead."

Jawad Karim Ali was on his way to pick up his aunt from Yarmukh Hospital when shooting started and the windscreen exploded cutting his face. " Then I was hit on my left shoulder by bullets, two of them another one went past my face. Now my aunt is out of hospital and I am sitting here. There was a big bang further away but no shots before the security people fired, and they just kept firing."

Baghdad's "Bloody Sunday" has become a test of sovereignty between the powers of the Iraqi government and the US. The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, said: "We will not tolerate the killing of our citizens in cold blood." The shooting was, he said, the seventh of its kind involving Blackwater.

The company, which has its headquarters in North Carolina, is one of the largest beneficiaries of the lucrative occupation dividend, holding the contract to provide security for top-level American officials.

Its reputation in Iraq is particularly controversial. It was the lynching of four of the company's employees in 2004 which led to the bloody confrontation in Fallujah. The men's bodies were set on fire, dragged through the streets and then hung from a bridge. Blackwater personnel are recognisable from their "uniform" of wraparound sunglasses and body armour over dark coloured sweatshirts and helmets. Employees are thought to earn about $600 (£300) per day.

Sunday's shooting happened at Mansour, once one of the most fashionable districts of Baghdad, with roads flanked by shops selling expensive goods, restaurants and art galleries. In the height of the sectarian bloodletting between Shias and Sunnis earlier this year dead bodies would be regularly strewn in the streets. A semblance of safety has returned since, and Mansour was held up as an example of how the US military "surge" was cutting the violence.

We were in Mansour on Sunday when we heard the sound of a deafening explosion just after midday. Black plumes of smoke rose from a half-blasted National Guard (army) post near a mosque. Five or six minutes afterwards there was the sound of prolonged shooting towards the south.

Police Captain Ali Ibrahim, who was on duty near Nisoor Square, said: " We heard the bomb go off, it was very loud, but it wasn't at the square. The police were, in fact, trying to clear the way for the contractors when they became agitated, they opened fire. No one was shooting at them."

Asked about the witness accounts, Ali al-Dabbagh, an Iraqi government spokesman, confirmed: "The traffic policemen were trying to open the road for them. It was a crowded square and one small car did not stop, it was moving very slowly. They started shooting randomly, there was a couple and their child inside the car and they were hit."

    The real story of Baghdad's Bloody Sunday, I, 21.9.2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2984819.ece

Migration Reshapes Iraq’s Sectarian Landscape

September 19, 2007
The New York Times
By JAMES GLANZ and ALISSA J. RUBIN

BAGHDAD, Sept. 18 — A vast internal migration is radically reshaping Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian landscape, according to new data collected by thousands of relief workers, but displacement in the most populous and mixed areas is surprisingly complex, suggesting that partitioning the country into semiautonomous Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish enclaves would not be easy.

The migration data, which are expected to be released this week by the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization but were given in advance to The New York Times, indicate that in Baghdad alone there are now nearly 170,000 families, accounting for almost a million people, that have fled their homes in search of security, shelter, water, electricity, functioning schools or jobs to support their families.

The figures show that many families move twice, three times or more, first fleeing immediate danger and then making more considered calculations based on the availability of city services or schools for their children. Finding neighbors of their own sect is just one of those considerations.

Over all, the patterns suggest that despite the ethnic and sectarian animosity that has gripped the country, at least some Iraqis would rather continue to live in mixed communities.

The Red Crescent compiled the figures from reports filed as recently as the end of August by tens of thousands of relief workers scattered across all parts of Iraq who are straining to provide aid for an estimated 280,000 families swept up nationwide in an enormous and complex migration.

A bird’s-eye view of the data suggests that since the bombing of a revered Shiite mosque in February 2006 triggered severe sectarian strife, Sunnis generally have been moving north and west, Shiites south, and Christians to the far north. But the picture in the mixed and highly populous center of the country is, if anything, becoming more complicated.

It is this mixed population center, the often violent interface between more homogeneous Sunni and Shiite regions, that some advocates of partition have suggested would separate into more homogeneous areas as Iraqis seek safety among members of their own sects.

But the new figures show that the migration is not neatly dividing Baghdad along the Tigris, separating Sunnis who live predominantly on the west bank from Shiites, who live predominantly on the east. Instead, some Sunnis are moving to the predominantly Shiite side of the river, into neighborhoods that are relatively secular, mixed and where services are better, according to Red Crescent staff.

Just last week within Baghdad itself, a Sunni tribe of 250 families that lived in Dora, one of the most violent neighborhoods, was forced to flee. Rather than going to an area where they would be with others of their sect, they went to their neighbors to the south, in Abu Dshir, a Shiite area. They were welcomed by the local tribe and given places to stay in people’s homes, according to field staff both for the Red Crescent and the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental agency.

Still, some poor Iraqis, for example those fleeing ethnic cleansing by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia in villages in the eastern province of Diyala, make the only choice available to them: head for Baghdad and stop in one of the refugee camps on the fringes of the city amid the other desperately poor.

The size and scope of the migration has elicited deep concern on the part of aid officials. Relief workers “have a mammoth task to alleviate the sufferings of this vast number of Iraqis,” a draft report on the Red Crescent figures says.

Although Iraqis of every income level, sect, ethnicity and region of the country have been caught up in this migration, perhaps the most tragic consequences turn up where enormous numbers of poor Iraqi villagers have collected in camps, shantytowns and urban slums after leaving behind almost everything they owned, said Dr. Said Hakki, a physician who is the president of the Red Crescent.

“It’s tragic, absolutely tragic,” Dr. Hakki said. “I have been a surgeon all my life, and I have seen death many times; that never scared me, never shook me. But when I saw the toll here in Iraq,” he said, referring to the groups of displaced people, “that definitely shook me.”

“How could a human let human beings suffer so much for so long?” Dr. Hakki said.

A jump in the recorded number of displaced people toward the end of the summer led the Red Crescent to delay releasing the report for about 10 days as the organization checked and double-checked the figures, Dr. Hakki said.

But he said that the figures, based on data collected in 130 branch offices, including 43 in Baghdad, by about 95,000 Red Crescent volunteers and a smaller number of regular employees, survived the scrutiny.

The Red Crescent figures, which are collected periodically, have broadly been consistent with data assembled by the International Organization for Migration, which is affiliated with the United Nations and collects its data from the Iraqi government and other sources.

But when contacted about the politically delicate findings in the latest Red Crescent report, a spokesman for the Ministry of Displacement and Migration, which tracks internal displacement for the government, said he believed that the figures were too high.

“The Red Crescent Organization, and even other international organizations, we don’t consider their statistics to be official,” said the spokesman, Sattar Nowroz.

Mr. Nowroz repeated the government’s oft-stated claim that thousands of families have returned to their homes after the start of a new Iraqi security plan that is running concurrently with an American troop increase.

But figures at both the Red Crescent and the Organization of Migration have previously shown that the numbers of internally displaced Iraqis has soared since the troop increase began. Mr. Nowroz conceded that the migration ministry had just 600 employees nationwide to track displaced people.

The ministry tracks only displaced people who come forward voluntarily and pass a series of bureaucratic hurdles involving paperwork at a minimum of three different government offices, Mr. Nowroz said.

Red Crescent workers point to a number of trends during the summer that contributed to the increased numbers that their organization is seeing in Baghdad.

Fighting in Diyala set people on the roads, fleeing the ongoing military operations by the American military against extremist Sunni Arab fighters. People who had fled to Jordan and Syria began to return because both countries began to enforce visa requirements for Iraqis who wanted to stay.

Sunnis also began to flee their homes because of the clashes between the Awakening movements, groups of Sunni Arab tribesmen who banded together to fight Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown extremist group which American intelligence sources believe has foreign leadership.

Iraqis considering just when to return from abroad may also have chosen the end of summer because school was approaching and some neighborhoods have seen reduced violence with the increased American troop presence. But when the Iraqis return, they often find that their homes have been looted or occupied, and they join the rolls of displaced people.

“Not all of this is because of the unsecure situation,” said Mazin A. Salloum, secretary general of the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization.

In Baghdad, many of the displacements measured by the Red Crescent are secondary or tertiary. Many people have already moved once and the statistics are reflecting their second or, in some cases, their third move. While the fear of sectarian violence or of being caught in ongoing military operations motivates people to make their initial move, it is the desire for better living conditions that drives them to make subsequent ones. Some people first go to relatives in areas outside Baghdad, but then migrate back into the city as they search for jobs, and for more access to electricity, water and schools.

“It’s like sea waves, tides that come in and out,” said Laith Abdul Aziz, the Red Crescent’s disaster manager for Iraq, who has been displaced himself.

“All this data will be reversed,” he said. “Winter is coming and those who have migrated to villages will come back to where there is good shelter, roofs that don’t leak, fuel, food.”

But some of the poorest displaced do not have even those choices. The Boob Sham camp, run by the Red Crescent Organization, sits forlornly on a swath of scrub desert that was once the site of an Iraqi Army barracks bombed by the Americans in 2003.

Opened in northeastern Baghdad in June for 17 Shiite families of the Anbekia tribe who were fleeing Diyala, it now has 52 families, and two of them just arrived Monday. Most live in tents but a few families have one room shelters made of mud mixed with hay.

Farmers and village tradesmen, they fled when gunmen from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia began a systematic sweep of their area. Hadi Hassan, 39, who came here with 13 family members, said six villages of the Anbekia tribe had already been emptied, including his.

He heard from neighbors that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia blew up his house after he left. Now the militants were continuing their cleansing, and another four villages of the tribe were under pressure. The families were poor before they fled, but because most of them had no time to pack their belongings, they are even poorer now.

Mr. Hassan’s family was one of those. He loaded his wife and children into his car and drove to Baghdad because he has two sisters living here, but when he arrived he found that each had a one-room house for their families; there was no room for his.

Since he arrived he has had to sell his car — he got $1,500 for it — because he needed to feed his family of six and he wanted to help the other seven relatives who fled with him, who are all women and children. Three of his sons stared shyly at the Red Crescent staff members; a fourth was nursing at Mr. Hassan’s wife’s breast. “Please help our men find a job,” she said.

The children traced designs with their plastic sandals in the shelter’s earthen floor and then stood in silence in the doorway staring at the open scrubland. “They remember their home, they remember climbing our date palms and eating the fruit right from the tree,” Mr. Hassan said. “But here. ...”

His voice trailed off, and he gestured at the scrub that lay just outside and shook his head. “No trees.”

    Migration Reshapes Iraq’s Sectarian Landscape, NYT, 19.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/world/middleeast/19displaced.html?hp

Iraqi PM Disputes Blackwater Version

September 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:14 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Iraq's prime minister on Wednesday disputed Blackwater USA's version of a weekend shooting that left at least 11 people dead and declared he would not tolerate ''the killing of our citizens in cold blood.''

Land travel by U.S. diplomats and other civilian officials outside the fortified Green Zone remained suspended for a second day after Iraqi authorities ordered Blackwater to stop working as an investigation continues into the Sunday incident.

The Moyock, N.C.-based firm is the main provider of bodyguards and armed escorts for American government civilian employees in Iraq.

Americans and Iraqis have offered widely differing accounts of the Sunday incident, with Blackwater insisting that its guards returned fire against armed insurgents who were threatening American diplomats.

But The New York Times reported late Tuesday that a preliminary review by Iraq's Ministry of Interior found that Blackwater security guards fired at a car when it did not heed a policeman's call to stop, killing a couple and their infant.

According to the story on the Times' Web site, the report said that Blackwater helicopters also had fired -- a finding the company denies. The Iraqi Ministry of Defense said that 20 Iraqis were killed, considerably higher than the 11 dead reported before.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said the Sunday shooting was ''the seventh of its kind'' involving Blackwater ''and these violations should be dealt with.''

''We will not tolerate the killing of our citizens in cold blood,'' al-Maliki said. ''The work of this company has been stopped in order to know the reasons.''

Al-Maliki said Blackwater's version of the events ''is not accurate'' and that U.S. diplomats could use the services of other security companies.

''Our information is that there was a violation,''' he said. ''We moved to form a committee to reveal to the world whether those killed were armed or innocent.''

Blackwater spokeswoman Anne E. Tyrrell said in a statement late Monday that ''Blackwater's independent contractors acted lawfully and appropriately in response to a hostile attack in Baghdad on Sunday.''

''The `civilians' reportedly fired upon by Blackwater professionals were in fact armed enemies and Blackwater personnel returned defensive fire,'' she said. ''Blackwater regrets any loss of life but this convoy was violently attacked by armed insurgents, not civilians, and our people did their job to defend human life.''

The Interior Ministry said Monday that it had permanently revoked Blackwater's license and would order its 1,000 personnel to leave the country. The following day the government rolled back, suggesting the firm's operations were only suspended pending completion of a joint U.S.-Iraqi investigation.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, en route to the Middle East, said Tuesday night that it was too soon to tell what effect the ban will have on U.S. operations in Iraq. Rice said she has expressed regret at the loss of life to the Iraqi prime minister.

''I committed to him that we were as interested as the Iraqi government in having a full investigation into what happened ... and to working with the Iraqi government to try and make certain that this sort of thing doesn't happen,'' Rice said.

Iraqis have long resented the presence of the estimated 48,000 private security contractors -- including about 1,000 Blackwater employees -- considering them a mercenary force that runs roughshod over civilians in their own country.

Blackwater, whose convoys of SUVs careen through the streets with weapons displayed, has been singled out for much of the criticism.

''Blackwater has a reputation. If you want over-over-the-top, gun-toting security with high profile and all the bells and whistles, Blackwater are the people you are going to go with,'' said James Sammons, a former Australian Special Air Service commander who now works for British-based AKE Group that also provides security in Iraq.

He said any civilian killings by security contractors tarnish the reputations of all of them.

''We get lumped in with that and it makes the job harder for the rest of us,'' said Sammons, who is AKE's Asia-Pacific regional director, based in Sydney, Australia.

The Iraqi Cabinet decided Tuesday to review the status of all foreign security companies. Still, it was unclear how the dispute would play out, given the government's need to appear resolute in defending national sovereignty while maintaining its relationship with Washington at a time when U.S. public support for the mission is faltering.

Nevertheless, some Iraqi officials said privately it would be difficult to order Blackwater out of the country because the Americans rely so heavily on the company for their security.

''It will be difficult for the Iraqi government to make them leave the country because they protect the embassy,'' said one aide to al-Maliki. ''Maybe they will make a commitment that they study their moves'' or agree to change the name of the company.

The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue is so sensitive.

Anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr demanded that the government ban all 48,000 foreign security contractors.

Al-Sadr's office in Najaf said the government should nullify contracts of all foreign security companies, branding them ''criminal and intelligence firms.''

''This aggression would not have happened had it not been for the presence of the occupiers who brought these companies, most of whose members are criminals and ex-convicts in American and Western prisons,'' the firebrand cleric said in a statement.

Al-Sadr insisted the government prosecute those involved and ensure that families of the victims receive compensation but did not threaten to unleash his Mahdi Army militia in retaliation for the killings.

Blackwater is among three private security firms employed by the State Department to protect employees in Iraq, and expelling it would create huge problems for U.S. government operations in this country.

A 2004 regulation issued by the U.S. occupation authority granted security contractors full immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law. Unlike American military personnel, the civilian contractors are also not subject to U.S. military law either.

Hassan al-Rubaie, a member of the parliament's Security and Defense Committee, said an investigative committee has been formed to consider lifting the contractors' immunity.

Blackwater and other foreign contractors accused of killing Iraqi citizens have gone without facing charges or prosecution in the past. But the latest incident drew a much stronger reaction by the Iraqi government.

Also Wednesday, the U.S. military said an American soldier was killed the day before in an attack in the south of the capital. The death raised to at least 3,787 members of the U.S. military who have died since the war started in March 2003, according to an AP count.

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Associated Press Writer Rod McGuirk in Sydney, Australia contributed to this report.

    Iraqi PM Disputes Blackwater Version, NYT, 19.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

Who Watches US Security Firms in Iraq?

September 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:56 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The fog of war keeps getting thicker. The Iraqi government's decision to temporarily ban the security company Blackwater USA after a fatal shooting of civilians in Baghdad reveals a growing web of rules governing weapons-bearing private contractors but few signs U.S. agencies are aggressively enforcing them.

Nearly a year after a law was passed holding contracted employees to the same code of justice as military personnel, the Bush administration has not published guidance on how military lawyers should do that, according to Peter Singer, a security industry expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

A Congressional Research Service report published in July said security contractors in Iraq operate under rules issued by the United States, Iraq and international entities such as the United Nations.

All have their limitations, however.

A court-martial of a private-sector employee likely would be challenged on constitutional grounds, the research service said, while Iraqi courts do not have the jurisdiction to prosecute contractors without U.S. permission.

''It is possible that some contractors may remain outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, civil or military, for improper conduct in Iraq,'' the report said.

Blackwater and other private security firms long have been fixtures in Iraq, guarding U.S. officials and an international work force helping to rebuild the war-torn country.

Prior to the March 2003 invasion, however, U.S. officials paid little attention to how prevalent these security firms would be in combat zones and the difficulties their presence could cause, according to Steve Schooner, co-director of the government procurement law program at George Washington University.

''The real problem is when we went into Iraq none of this had been worked out,'' Schooner said. ''We hadn't thought it through.''

The result is dissatisfaction on multiple fronts that is tempered by the acknowledgment these hired hands have become an important part of the long-running effort to stabilize Iraq.

''This is what happens when government fails to act,'' Singer wrote on the Brookings Web site of the incident Sunday involving Blackwater.

Iraq's government said Tuesday it would review the status of all security firms working in Iraq to ensure each is complying with Iraqi laws.

But Iraqi government representatives also said they probably would not rescind Order No. 17, which was issued more than three years ago by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. The order gives American security companies immunity from Iraqi prosecution on issues arising from their contracts.

''We don't want to do so because we don't have the services they are providing for the diplomats and for the American Embassy here in Iraq,'' government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told CNN.

Blackwater, based in Moyock, N.C., is one of three private security firms employed by the State Department to protect its personnel in Iraq. The two others, both of which are headquartered in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, are Dyncorp, based in Falls Church, Va., and Triple Canopy of Herndon, Va.

The State Department has provided little information on Sunday's incident, which began after a car bomb attack against an American convoy guarded by Blackwater employees turned into a firefight that left eight Iraqis dead.

The department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security is conducting an investigation with assistance from the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. The Iraqis are conducting their own inquiry, although it seems unlikely the Iraqi government would revoke Blackwater's license and order the company's 1,000 personnel to leave the country.

Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell said the guards acted ''lawfully and appropriately'' after being ''violently attacked by armed insurgents.''

In a separate development, a congressional committee is questioning how aggressively the State Department has looked into allegations that Blackwater illegally brought weapons into Iraq.

In a letter to Howard Krongard, the State Department inspector general, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said Krongard impeded a Justice Department probe into claims that a ''large private security contractor was smuggling weapons into Iraq.''

Although the security company was not named in the letter, several senior administration officials confirmed it was Blackwater.

In an e-mailed response to the committee's charges, Krongard said Tuesday he made one of his ''best investigators'' available for the probe.

Tyrrell declined to comment.

For Democrats in Congress, the Blackwater shooting incident has reinvigorated an effort to pass additional regulations on how security contractors operate.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., a longtime critic of Blackwater, is pushing legislation requiring the Pentagon and State Department to provide details about security contractors it has hired, including any disciplinary actions taken against them.

''I think we have to have some uniform rules, particularly when these security guys are walking around fully armed,'' Schakowsky said Tuesday. ''Who are they accountable to?''

But that's not because there is a shortage of laws, according to Laura Dickinson, a law professor at the University of Connecticut who has studied the use of private contractors on the battlefield.

''There are plenty of laws that apply to them,'' said Dickinson, who is working on a book called ''Outsourcing War and Peace.''

The problem is enforcement, she said.

The Pentagon and State Department have their own contracting officers and separate systems for ensuring performance and accountability.

Dickinson said a single government office is needed to monitor contracts and keep Congress informed.

''I don't think there's real clarity about what the rules of the game are either,'' said Schakowsky, a member of the House Intelligence Committee. ''It's a very murky area.''

The International Peace Operations Association, a trade group that represents Blackwater and other companies doing business in Iraq, is not opposed to better oversight of the industry, according to Doug Brooks, the group's president.

That begins with the federal government having a deeper pool of experienced contracting officers who can properly monitor the work that's being done, he said.

''The companies try to operate within their contracts,'' Brooks said. ''It's a problem when you can't get a hold of a contracting officer, or when the contracting officers don't understand how the contracts work.''

------

On the Net:

Blackwater USA: http://www.blackwaterusa.com

    Who Watches US Security Firms in Iraq?, NYT, 19.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq-Contractors.html

Sectarian Toll Includes Scars to Iraq Psyche

September 17, 2007
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

BAGHDAD, Sept. 16 — Violence swept over the Muhammad family in December, taking the father, the family’s house and all of its belongings in one chilly morning. But after the Muhammads fled, it subsided and life re-emerged — ordinary and quiet — in its wake.

Now they no longer have to hide their Shiite last name. The eldest daughter does not have to put on an Islamic head scarf. Grocery shopping is not a death-defying act.

Although the painful act of leaving is behind them, their minds keep returning to the past, trying to process a violation that was as brutal as it was personal: young men from the neighborhood shot the children’s father as they watched. Later, the men took the house.

“I lost everything in one moment,” said Rossel, the eldest daughter. “I don’t know who I am now. I’m somebody different.”

They are educated people, and they say they do not want revenge. But typical of those who are left from Iraq’s reasonable middle, the Muhammads have been hardened toward others by violence, and they have been forced to feel their sectarian identity, a mental closing that allows war made by militants to spread.

“In the past the country lived all together, but now, no,” Rossel said. “I don’t trust anyone.”

Iraqis have continued to flee their homes throughout the American troop increase, which began early this year, and despite assurances that it is becoming safe to return, uncrossable lines have been left in Iraqi minds and neighborhoods. Schools, hospitals and municipal buildings are quickly losing their diversity, and even moderate Iraqis like the Muhammads say they cannot imagine ever going back.

In northeastern Baghdad, Hashem, a polite 14-year-old from a different Shiite family, has an acute sense of sect. (For his safety, his last name is not being used.) The players in his soccer club are Shiite. His school is three-quarters Shiite. His five or six close friends are all Shiites. He refrains from telling a joke he likes about a Sunni politician because it might hurt the feelings of the Sunni boys.

Though the alignment is religious, in practice it is more like being on the same sports team: Hashem, like his father, is not at all devout.

“In the beginning it was a shame to say Sunni or Shiite,” he said, sitting on a couch in a guest room in a heavily Shiite neighborhood in northern Baghdad, “but we know.”

His school has adjusted to new sectarian imperatives; the punishment for arguing about religion is a three-day suspension. So when he fought with a Sunni boy who was making chauvinistic remarks about Shiites, the two walked away without telling the adults what the fight was about.

Part of the sensitivity comes from trauma inflicted by Saddam Hussein’s government: years ago, Hashem’s grandparents were forced out of their homes by local Baathists and died in the desert.

The segregation is reshaping the structure of families. On a recent Tuesday, a thin parade of tired-looking couples trudged through the office of a family court judge in Sharchiya, a mostly Shiite neighborhood in central Baghdad. Only about 5 percent of the marriage contracts he registers are for mixed-sect couples, down from about 50 percent before the war, the judge said.

“It used to be more festive,” he said, after a mother in a black Islamic robe limply threw a handful of candies in his direction. The court is one of the city’s few family courts, but as a testament to how separated the neighborhoods are now, just one in 10 couples he marries is Sunni.

The patterns started to form in 2005, when militants began pushing Iraqis out of their houses, a deeply personal violation that often leaves families jobless and impoverished.

In a survey of 200 displaced Shiite families living in Karbala, a southern city, researchers from Al Amal, an organization that assists the displaced, found that 60 percent were unable to take their furniture or belongings when they fled.

Rossel’s father, a suit importer, was killed while packing the family’s belongings into cars to move out of Dora, an area in southern Baghdad controlled by Sunni Islamists. The Muhammads were never able to return, though a kindly neighbor drove their car to them in their new, mostly Shiite, neighborhood in Baghdad. They lost their past — photograph albums, diaries and heirlooms.

Not everyone in the family wanted to know what happened to the house, but Rossel was told that a Sunni family she did not know had moved in.

“I try to imagine my room and what they do in it,” she said, her voice intense.

Rasheed Hameed, a Sunni Kurd, was forced out of his house this summer in Baya, another southern neighborhood, and moved his family to safety in Syria. Back in Baghdad, he saved some of his furniture with the help of neighbors who have militia connections. His dresser, kitchen chest and bed frame stood awkwardly in a courtyard at his new house on Friday. Inside, several large printing machines sat like giant unwanted guests, the property of a previous owner.

“They destroyed all my life,” Mr. Hameed said, gesturing at the furniture. “For what? We don’t know. What is our crime?”

Early in the war, it was extremely rare that an Iraqi would know his or her attacker, but as time went on the violence moved closer to home. In the Karbala study, 47 percent of families said that their neighbors were directly or indirectly responsible for their flight. The men who tipped off the killer of Rossel’s father lived in the neighborhood and were working as movers for the family on the day he was shot.

Omar, an 18-year-old Sunni who withheld his family name for his safety, said that as Shiites took over his neighborhood in western Baghdad, childhoods spent together seemed never to have existed. Now he and his cousins change the subject when old Shiite friends walk past his stoop. Safe topics: electricity, girls and soccer.

“It’s true we used to play with them,” he said, “but we couldn’t read what was inside their hearts.”

Omar’s father was shot dead by six men from the neighborhood in May. Omar can name every one of them. Now they visit his grocery shop and take sodas without paying. They were poor before the war. Now they drive Land Cruisers taken from their victims.

They drive through the neighborhood, windows down, blasting songs about the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and sometimes honking the horn.

“As if they are telling us, ‘We killed him, and now we’re driving his car,’ ” Omar said.

Meanness crept in, as privileged Sunnis lost status, Shiites became the targets of attacks and the cycle of revenge began.

Shaima Ali Hussein, a Shiite student from a Sunni-dominated city north of Baghdad, said male medical students she had known for years refused to sit next to her during an exam, and an anatomy professor forced her to examine a cadaver without gloves, behavior strictly forbidden for Shiites, she said.

“Even the patients didn’t want to be touched by us,” she said.

She tried to accept some of their views, “in order to open a window in their minds, but they closed it and threw away the key,” she said.

Her family fled to Baghdad late last year, around the time her brother’s college friend, a Shiite outspoken about his identity, was beheaded.

“I don’t trust these people,” Ms. Hussein said, sitting in a sunny front room of their new house in Karada, a largely Shiite neighborhood. “Their minds are closed. I’m so tired. I want to isolate them. But instead, they have isolated me.”

Ms. Hussein distrusts new American efforts to work with Sunni tribes, fearing that will backfire by arming a force that will turn on Shiites.

Despite widespread displacement, large parts of the city are still mixed, and society has not broken down completely. Acts of kindness are everywhere. In Ur, a Shiite neighborhood, a family broke a human-size hole into a wall that separated its house from Sunni neighbors so that the Sunni family could flee through it and pose as Shiites if militia members arrived.

Many Iraqis take pride in having friends and neighbors of the opposite sect. Ms. Hussein’s father showed a poem he had received by text message from a Sunni friend. Rossel’s father had two close Sunni friends, also importers, though the men now live in Dubai. Rossel’s brother Zain, 19, volunteers for Al Amal, the religiously diverse community group that helps the displaced.

In many ways the war, at least in the capital, has moved past sect and ideology, deep into the realm of the criminal. Gangs mouth sectarian slogans but kill for property and power. In Omar’s neighborhood, Shiite militias are killing their own: they have slain 16 Shiites in the past two months, including four women and a 9-year-old girl.

The deeper the war penetrates, the more people in the middle are forced to take a side. Zain was never interested in his Shiite identity, but after his father’s killing, he contacted Shiite leaders in his new neighborhood. He would be naïve to ignore it, he said. He said he remembered when Sunni militants in his old neighborhood stopped hiding their identities.

“My Sunni friends said, ‘Join with us or get out.’ ”

Sunnis who move to quiet Shiite areas, like the Sunni couple who moved next door to Hashem’s family this year, hide basic details of their lives out of fear of being noticed. Joining new neighborhoods is difficult, particularly for someone from the opposite sect, as trust between Iraqis is broken.

Sunnis in western Baghdad, Hashem’s mother said, “deserve what they get,” because they allowed militants to mingle among them.

Omar seethed in silent fury as he gave soda and cellphone scratch cards to his father’s killers. Then they asked for something far more serious: that he watch and report movements of American troops from the door of his father’s store. He had no choice but to agree. Moving the family would make it poor, and take the children out of school.

“When I see them I want to jump on them, beat them, torture them, kill them,” he said, biting his bottom lip. “But I can’t. I’m alone. I’m Sunni in a Shiite area.”

Hosham Hussein and Qais Mizher contributed reporting.

    Sectarian Toll Includes Scars to Iraq Psyche, NYT, 17.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/world/middleeast/17baghdad.html

Security Firm’s License Is Pulled in Iraq

September 17, 2007
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

BAGHDAD, Sept. 17 — The Iraqi government said it had revoked the license of Blackwater USA, a private security company that provides protection for American diplomats across Iraq, after shots fired from an American convoy killed eight Iraqis.

Abdul-Karim Khalaf, a spokesman for Iraq’s Ministry of Interior, said the authorities had canceled the company’s license and barred its activity across Iraq. He said the government would prosecute the deaths, though according to the rules that govern private contractors, it was not clear whether the Iraqis had the legal authority to do so.

“This is a big crime that we can’t stay silent before,” said Jawad al-Bolani, Iraq’s interior minister, speaking on satellite television. “Anyone who wants to have good relations with Iraq has to respect Iraqis.”

The incident took place on Sunday in Nisour Square, an area in western Baghdad that is clogged with construction and concrete blocks. American officials said that a convoy of State Department vehicles came under fire, causing one to break down. It was towed. The officials did not say whether any of the convoy’s security guards fired back or whether they worked for Blackwater.

Shortly before the incident, a car bomb had detonated some distance away, according to an Interior Ministry official, and mortars had landed in an Iraqi Army base that has guard towers overlooking the square. A grocery shop owner, Abu Muhammad, reported seeing two helicopters firing down into the area, apparently reacting to the nearby explosions.

A spokeswoman for the United States Embassy, Mirenbe Nantongo, seemed to confirm that when she told reporters on a conference call, “Our people were reacting to a car bombing.”

    Security Firm’s License Is Pulled in Iraq, NYT, 17.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/world/middleeast/17cnd-iraq.html?hp

Bicycle Bomb Kills at Least 5 in Iraq, Police Say

September 16, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:18 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- A booby-trapped bicycle exploded near a cafe serving tea and food during Ramadan fasting hours Sunday, killing at least five people in a religiously mixed area in northern Iraq, police said.

Dozens of fighters linked to the Sunni-dominated al-Qaida in Iraq streamed into Shiite villages north of Baghdad, torching homes and killing at least 15 residents, police and army officials said.

In separate violence, Iraqi police said security contractors opened fire in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood of western Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least nine civilians. The U.S. Embassy said contractors working for the State Department were involved in an incident in Baghdad but provided no further details, saying an investigation was still under way.

''We saw a convoy of SUVs passing in the street nearby. One minute later, we heard the sound of bomb explosion followed by gunfire that lasted for 20 minutes between gunmen and the convoy people who were foreigners and dressed in civilian clothes. Everybody in the street started to flee immediately,'' said Hussein Abdul-Abbas, who owns a cell phone store nearby.

The police officer who reported the shootings in Mansour spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

American soldiers arrived afterward and were not involved, military spokesman Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl said.

Many contractors have been accused of indiscriminately firing at American and Iraqi troops, and of shooting to death an unknown number of Iraqi citizens who got too close to their heavily armed convoys, but not one has faced charges or prosecution.

The wartime numbers of private guards are unprecedented -- as are their duties, many of which have traditionally been done by soldiers. They protect U.S. military operations and have guarded high-ranking officials including Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Baghdad. They also protect journalists, visiting foreign officials and thousands of construction projects.

In the raids on the villages of Jichan and Ghizlayat, the fighters arrived from several different directions and residents fought back until Iraqi security forces arrived and chased the attackers, who fled to nearby farms.

The clashes about 60 miles north of Baghdad lasted about two hours, the officials and witnesses said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared reprisals.

In all, at least 39 people were killed or found dead nationwide. The bloodshed came the day after al-Qaida in Iraq announced a new offensive in the Islamic holy month and was a blow to government hopes that a peaceful Ramadan would demonstrate the success of the seven-month operation in the capital.

Separately, a suspected al-Qaida in Iraq fighter believed responsible for the assassination of a U.S.-allied Sunni sheik was arrested north of the capital, the military said Sunday.

In the late-morning blast in Tuz Khormato, 130 miles north of Baghdad, witnesses said a boy left the bicycle bomb near the cafe, which was located in a popular market and was one of the few open during daylight hours despite Ramadan. Tradition requires faithful to abstain from eating and drinking from sunrise to sunset during the monthlong observance.

Two of the slain victims were in the cafe, while three were in the market, police chief Capt. Abbas Mohammed said. He also said 19 people were wounded.

No one claimed responsibility for the attack.

The government, meanwhile, faced a deepening political crisis with Saturday's announcement that anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's followers were withdrawing from the Shiite alliance in parliament. Al-Sadr's followers hold 30 of the 275 parliament seats.

The announcement, made to reporters in Najaf, means the Shiite-led government can count on the support of only 108 parliament members -- 30 short of a majority. However, it could probably win the backing of the 30 independent Shiite parliamentarians, as well as some minor parties.

Al-Sadr's decision will sharpen the power struggle among armed Shiite groups in the south, which includes major Shiite religious shrines and much of the country's vast oil resources.

But Shiites have shown signs of increasing frustration with militia violence, much of it blamed on breakaway Mahdi Army factions and criminal gangs and extortion rings.

American commanders in southern Iraq have said Shiite sheiks are showing interest in joining forces with the U.S. military against extremists, in much the same way that Sunni clansmen in the western part of the country have worked with American forces against al-Qaida in Iraq.

One of those clansmen, Sheik Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, was assassinated Thursday outside his compound in the Anbar capital of Ramadi, just days after he met with U.S. President Bush.

The U.S. military said an al-Qaida linked militant believed responsible for his death -- Fallah Khalifa Hiyas Fayyas al-Jumayli, an Iraqi also known as Abu Khamis -- was seized Saturday.

''We do not assess that he was operating alone, there is an investigation and continuing operations that are focused on ensuring that all people who were involved in this attack or in this murder will be detained,'' said Rear. Adm. Mark Fox, a U.S. military spokesman.

------

Associated Press writers Hamid Ahmed and Qassim Abdul-Zahra contributed to this report.

    Bicycle Bomb Kills at Least 5 in Iraq, Police Say, NYT, 16.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

Dozens Arrested in Antiwar Protest Near Capitol

September 16, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON. Sept. 15 — A rally on Saturday to protest the war in Iraq, which began with a peaceful march of several thousand people to the Capitol, ended with dozens of arrests in a raucous demonstration that evoked the angry spirit of the Vietnam era protests of more than three decades ago.

The police, including some officers dressed in riot gear, tried to halt demonstrators as they sought to climb over a low wall near the Capitol after a march that had begun near the White House in a festive atmosphere.

The protest grew tense as the chanting, placard-carrying demonstrators gathered near the Capitol for a planned “die-in.” Officers struggled to keep demonstrators from breaking through their ranks and began arresting those who tried.

Demonstrators were pushed to the ground, placed in plastic handcuffs and led away to the Capitol. Sgt. Kimberly Schneider, a spokeswoman for the Capitol Police, said that the authorities had arrested 189 people and that they would be charged with illegally crossing a police line. Two protesters and two police officers received minor injuries, Sergeant Schneider said.

The antiwar demonstration was held on the same day as a separate event sponsored by a group called Gathering of Eagles, a veterans group.

Before the antiwar marchers arrived, there was a brief physical altercation between some members of the antiwar group Code Pink and some of the demonstrators who said they were there to support the troops. The police moved in to break up the scuffle. As the antiwar demonstrators moved along Pennsylvania Avenue, the two sides continued to trade chants and sometimes heated messages, but lines of police officers intervened to keep the opposing sides apart.

“What troubles me, the thing that is so dismaying, is they don’t realize the big picture,” said John Aldins, 54, who came from Media, Pa., with his wife, Karen, and daughter, Rachel, to show their support for the troops. The Aldins have three other children serving in the military. Rachel Aldins will join the Army in the fall to serve as a nurse.

“It’s not just Iraq, it’s the whole Middle East,” Mr. Aldins said. “It’s not a red, blue or pink issue. It’s an all-of-us issue.”

The protests came during a week in which Iraq dominated the attention of the White House and Congress. In a speech on Thursday, President Bush sought support for a substantial military presence in Iraq and a gradual troop reduction.

Members of the Answer Coalition, the umbrella organization of activist groups behind the demonstration, are demanding an immediate troop withdrawal. Some of the protesters called for Mr. Bush’s impeachment. Speakers at the rally included familiar political and antiwar activists, among them Cindy Sheehan, Ralph Nader and Ramsey Clark.

Brian Becker, a national coordinator for the coalition, said in a statement: “What Bush really intends is to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for years or decades to come. He plans to move forward with a policy that will continue to kill thousands of U.S. service members and hundreds of the thousands of Iraqis.”

Several marchers said they were demonstrating against what they called the Bush administration’s false assertions about Iraq. Kim Druist, 39, a nurse from Plainsboro, N.J., who wore a camouflage shirt to represent solidarity with American troops, said she intended to be arrested to protest the testimony by Gen. David H. Petraeus earlier in the week in which he said there had been progress in Iraq. Ms. Druist referred the statement to as propaganda.

Some people said they were protesting other Bush administration policies.

Chris Hager, 62, of Falls Church, Va., and Wendy Salomon, 52, of Arlington, Va., walked through the crowd assembled in front of the White House wearing orange jumpsuits and dark hoods to represent the detainees in Guantánamo Bay and other detention centers. “We are here to help to get the American people to think about what is being done in our name,” Mr. Hager said.

He added: “We want to make people think about what is happening. This certainly wasn’t the country I was brought up to believe in.”

Sarah Abruzzese and Holli Chmela contributed reporting.

    Dozens Arrested in Antiwar Protest Near Capitol, NYT, 16.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/washington/16protest.html?hp

Top General Acknowledges Iraq Mistakes

September 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:03 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. military's top general acknowledged Friday that he made mistakes in his early Iraq war strategy but said he still has no doubt that invading the country was the right decision.

Marine Gen. Peter Pace, retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and one of the war's military architects, said he overestimated the ability of the Iraqi army to hold together after the invasion, and as a result underestimated the number of U.S. troops that would eventually be needed to fight the war.

Offering a blunt assessment of the decisions and recommendations he made back in early 2003, an introspective Pace told Pentagon reporters that with the aid of 20-20 hindsight, it's clear he made ''errors in assumption.''

''One of the mistakes I made in my assumptions going in was that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi army would welcome liberation, that the Iraqi army, given the opportunity, would stand together for the Iraqi people and be available to them to help serve the new nation,'' said Pace, who will leave the chairman's job on Oct. 1. ''If I knew that the Iraqi army was not going to be available, then I probably would have made a different recommendation about the total size force going in.''

In retrospect, he said, ''you say you wish you knew, but you didn't know on the way in.''

A Vietnam veteran who became the first Marine to chair the Joint Chiefs, Pace, 61, became another political casualty of the Iraq war, more than four years into the conflict.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates had planned to reappoint Pace for a second two-year term but in early June he changed his mind. Gates said he decided to replace Pace because the escalating discord -- particularly in Congress -- over the war would have triggered a bitter confirmation process, which would hurt the country.

On Friday, Pace offered his most extensive public self-evaluation of his Joint Chiefs tenure -- which has included two years as chairman and four years as vice chairman.

Believing that the Iraqi army could be rebuilt, retrained and equipped by the end of 2006, Pace said that he did not -- and never would think to -- recommend in early 2006 that the size of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps be expanded.

But after the bombing of the revered Shiite mosque in Samarra in Feb. 2006, which unleashed widespread sectarian slaughter, it became clear that the U.S. would not be able to reduce force levels then and instead would have to beef up its own military to maintain troop rotations.

So, by the end of the year, Pace and other military were endorsing an increase in the size of both the Army and the Marine Corps.

Still, Pace said that after going back and reviewing his decisions, ''I am comfortable in my own mind, with the things that I knew at the time, the recommendations that I made.''

Further, he said, he has not wavered in his belief that the U.S. made the right call by invading Iraq.

Asked whether he still stands by comments he made several years ago when he said he had no doubts about the move, Pace did not hesitate.

''I absolutely do. Absolutely do. Absolutely do,'' he said.

''I'm proud of the fact that we stood and fought in Afghanistan and we are standing and fighting in Iraq. And did we make mistakes? Yes. But are we on the right path? Yes,'' he said, as Gates looked on. ''Is it providing additional freedom for Iraqis and Afghanis, providing additional freedom for us at home? You bet. The more free people around the world, the stronger our democracy is and the safer our democracy is.''

------

On the Net:

Joint Chiefs of Staff: http://www.jcs.mil

Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil

    Top General Acknowledges Iraq Mistakes, NYT, 15.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Pace-Iraq-Mistakes.html

Gates Raises Prospect of More Troop Cuts

September 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:55 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates raised the possibility Friday of cutting U.S. troop levels in Iraq to 100,000 by the end of next year, well beyond the cuts President Bush has approved.

Stressing that he was expressing a hope, not an administration plan, Gates said it was possible that conditions in Iraq would improve enough to merit much deeper troop cuts than are currently scheduled for 2008.

Asked at a news conference whether he was referring to lowering today's level of about 169,000 U.S. troops to about 100,000 by the end of next year, Gates replied, ''That would be the math.'' He quickly added, however, that because ''there is no script'' in war, his hoped-for cuts could vanish.

It was the first time a member of Bush's war cabinet had publicly suggested such deep reductions, perhaps offering a conciliatory hand to anti-war Democrats and some wary Republicans in Congress who have been pushing for troop reductions, a change in the U.S. mission and an end to the war.

Democratic leaders seized on a White House report sent Friday to Congress as evidence that Bush's war policy is failing. The assessment showed that the Iraqi government was making satisfactory progress toward meeting nine of 18 political and military goals -- only one more satisfactory grade than in a July report.

''As hard as they may have tried to spin it, today's assessment by the White House on the political situation in Iraq once again shows that the president's flawed escalation policy is not working,'' Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in a statement. ''It certainly does not justify keeping 130,000 soldiers mired in an open-ended civil war as the president has chosen to do.''

Next week, the Senate is expected to resume debate on anti-war legislation.

Gates used his news conference to launch an attack on efforts by Democrats to force Bush to change course in Iraq by imposing new restrictions on how the Pentagon uses or manages the armed forces.

Gates was particularly pointed in his criticism of a proposal by Sen. James Webb, D-Va., to require that troops be given as much time at their home station as on deployments to the war front. Today, active-duty Army units are on 15-month deployments with a promise of no more than 12 months rest, and Marines who spend seven or more months at war sometimes get six months or less at home.

Gates said that while he believed such proposals are well-intentioned, they have serious flaws. He said, for example, that Webb's amendment, if enacted, would force him to consider again extending tours in Iraq.

''We would have to accept gaps in capability as units that rotate home aren't replaced right away for periods perhaps of weeks,'' Gates said. It also might put troops' lives in greater danger by reducing opportunities for incoming units to get acquainted with their responsibilities by working for a few weeks with outgoing units, he said.

''The other message that I worry that some of the amendments send is that it sends a signal to potential adversaries that we're stretched so thinly and that we are so strained that we cannot adequately respond to crises elsewhere in the world,'' Gates said. ''And that's not a correct view, if others should take it, but it is a worry.''

In a visit to the Marine base at Quantico, Va., on Friday, Bush said commanders in Iraq would ''have the flexibility and the troops needed to achieve the mission,'' and he urged Congress to heed the advice of Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, not to withdraw too speedily.

''I also expect the Congress to support our men and women in uniform and their families,'' Bush said.

Gates, striking an optimistic note, said that if the current plan for troop withdrawals between now and next summer are carried out fully, it is possible that some U.S. units will not have to serve a full 15 months.

''Maybe 14 months, 14 and a half months, 13 and a half months,'' he said. ''We just don't know right now. It will all depend on a lot of ifs. But just looking at the mathematics of it, that's a possibility.''

Gates opened the Pentagon news conference with an appeal for a bipartisan consensus on a way forward in Iraq.

''The consequences of American failure in Iraq at this point would, I believe, be disastrous not just for Iraq but for the region, for the United States and for the world,'' Gates said. ''No discussion of where and how we go from here can avoid this stark reality.''

Gates also said he saw early signs that Shiites in Iraq may be starting to turn against Shiite extremists in the Mahdi Army who have gone too far with their violent ways -- in the same way that a growing number of ordinary Sunnis have revolted against Sunni extremists to bring a new peace to Anbar province.

Bush announced Thursday that he had approved a plan recommended by Petraeus to reduce troop levels from the current 20 combat brigades to 15 brigades by July. Gates said it was too early for Petraeus or others to forecast with confidence the timing and scale of any additional cuts.

Bush has ordered Petraeus to make a further assessment and fresh recommendations next March.

''My hope is that when he does his assessment in March that General Petraeus will be able to say that he thinks that the pace of the drawdowns can continue at the same rate in the second half of the year as in the first half of the year,'' Gates said.

''That's my hope,'' Gates said, adding that experience has shown that hopes can be quickly dashed in a war that has been far more difficult and costly than anyone in the administration had expected.

If the troop reductions through July 2008 that Bush has approved are carried out fully, the U.S. force in Iraq may be larger by several thousand troops that it was when Bush's troop buildup began early this year. That is because at least some of the roughly 8,500 support troops that went with 21,500 extra combat troops between February and June are likely to be kept in place, officials said.

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Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor, Anne Flaherty and Jennifer Loven contributed to this report.

    Gates Raises Prospect of More Troop Cuts, NYT, 15.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq.html

Iraq: al - Qaida Group Threatens Sunnis

September 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:23 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- An al-Qaida front group warns it will hunt down and kill Sunni Arab tribal leaders who cooperate with the U.S. and its Iraqi partners in the wake of the assassination of the leader of the revolt against the terror movement.

The warning was contained in a statement posted Friday on an Islamist Web site claiming responsibility for the assassination of Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, who spearheaded the uprising against al-Qaida in Anbar province west of the capital.

In the statement, the Islamic State of Iraq said it had formed ''special security committees'' to track down and ''assassinate the tribal figures, the traitors, who stained the reputations of the real tribes by submitting to the soldiers of the Crusade'' and the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

''We will publish lists of names of the tribal figures to scandalize them in front of our blessed tribes,'' the statement added.

U.S. officials hope Abu Risha's death will not reverse the tide against al-Qaida, which began last year when he organized Sunni clans to fight the terror movement, producing a dramatic turnaround in Ramadi and other parts of Anbar province.

The revolt has spread to Sunni insurgent groups in Baghdad, Diyala province and elsewhere. Some insurgents who were ambushing U.S. troops a few months ago are now working alongside the Americans to rid their communities of al-Qaida.

Abu Risha's brother Ahmed was elected head of the Anbar Awakening movement soon after the Thursday bombing at the family's heavily guarded compound on the outskirts of Ramadi.

Iraqi officials said the roadside bomb was just outside Abu Risha's walled compound in view of a guard shack and an Iraqi police checkpoint.

Abu Risha's assassination cast a cloud over President Bush's claims of progress in Iraq, especially in Anbar, which had been the center of the Sunni insurgency until the dramatic turnaround by the local sheiks. Bush met with Abu Risha during a visit to Anbar on Sept. 3.

In a televised address Thursday, Bush ordered gradual reductions in U.S. forces in Iraq but rejected calls to end the war. More than 130,000 U.S. troops will remain after the withdrawals are completed in July.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Friday raised the possibility of cutting U.S. troop levels to 100,000 or so by the end of 2008, if conditions on the ground improve enough.

In Saturday's violence, an Iraqi soldier was killed when unidentified gunmen attacked a checkpoint in Baqouba, capital of Diyala province, Iraqi army said. The city had been a stronghold of the Islamic State until U.S. soldiers overran it in July.

A joint Iraqi-U.S. force traded gunfire Saturday with a purported al-Qaida operative near the Diyala town of Muqdadiyah, killing him and arresting his son, provincial police said. Elsewhere in Diyala, police found a charred car with two unidentified bodies inside in the town of Khalis.

To the south, American soldiers conducted house-to-house searches Saturday in the mostly Shiite city of Diwaniyah, killing one person and arresting two others, Iraqi police said. The neighborhood is controlled by Shiite militiamen.

A roadside bomb exploded Saturday in Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad, injuring five Iraqi soldiers and damaging one Humvee, the Iraqi army said. Two civilians were injured in a bombing near a police patrol in Mahaweel, 35 miles south of Baghdad, police said.

----

Associated Press correspondent Maggie Michael contributed to this report from Cairo, Egypt.

    Iraq: al - Qaida Group Threatens Sunnis, NYT, 15.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

Gates Says US Defeat Would Be a Disaster

September 14, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:54 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday that a U.S. defeat in Iraq would be ''disastrous'' and President Bush's strategy deserves bipartisan support in Congress.

''The consequences of American failure in Iraq at this point would, I believe, be disastrous not just for Iraq but for the region, for the United States and for the world,'' Gates told a Pentagon news conference.

''No discussion of where and how we go from here can avoid this stark reality,'' he added.

Gates asserted that all senior military leaders fully agreed with the recommendations Gen. David Petraeus presented to Bush and to Congress, including his proposal to begin a modest troop withdrawal this year.

Seated beside Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the soon-to-retire chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gates said he deliberately kept quiet in public about his own opinions regarding a way forward in Iraq.

In his first public remarks since Bush's announcement of troop reductions in Iraq starting this month, Gates said he saw little likelihood that he would recommend that Bush accelerate the drawdown, as many in Congress have recommended.

Gates described the president's decision, announced Thursday evening, as representing ''the beginning of a transition of mission, beginning in December.''

It was Gates' first Pentagon press conference since mid-July.

    Gates Says US Defeat Would Be a Disaster, NYT, 14.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Gates.html

4 U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq Bombing

September 14, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:43 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Mourners vowed revenge and perseverance Friday at the funeral of the leader of the Sunni Arab revolt against al-Qaida militants, who was assassinated just 10 days after meeting with President Bush.

In eastern Diyala province, meanwhile, a bomb exploded near a U.S. military vehicle on Friday, killing four American soldiers in, the U.S. command said. They were the first American deaths reported in Iraq since Monday.

Late Friday, an al-Qaida front in Iraq claimed responsibility for assassinating Adbul-Sattar Abu Risha. A statement posted on the Internet by the Islamic State of Iraq called Abu Risha ''one of the dogs of Bush'' and described Thursday's killing as a ''heroic operation that took over a month to prepare.''

Al-Qaida earlier had killed four of the sheik's brothers and six other relatives for working with the U.S. military.

More than 1,500 mourners marched along the highway near the home of Abu Risha, who was killed along with two bodyguards and a driver by a bomb hidden near his house, just west of Ramadi.

Scores of Iraqi police and U.S. military vehicles lined the route to protect the procession as it followed the black SUV carrying the sheik's Iraqi-flag draped coffin.

''We will take our revenge,'' the mourners chanted along the six-mile route to Risha's family cemetery, many of them crying. ''We will continue the march of Abu Risha.''

Abu Risha was buried one year after the goateed, charismatic, chain-smoking sheik organized 25 Sunni Arab clans under the umbrella of the Anbar Awakening Council, an alliance against al-Qaida in Iraq, to drive terrorists from sanctuaries where they had flourished after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

U.S. officials credit Abu Risha and allied sheiks with a dramatic improvement in security in such Anbar flashpoints as Fallujah and Ramadi after years of American failure to subdue the extremists. U.S. officials now talk of using the Anbar model to organize tribal fighters elsewhere in Iraq.

Bush hailed Abu Risha's courage during his Sept. 3 visit to al-Asad Air Base in Anbar province, and vowed in his nationally televised address Thursday night to help others carry on his work.

''Earlier today, one of the brave tribal sheiks who helped lead the revolt against al-Qaida was murdered,'' Bush said Thursday. ''In response, a fellow Sunni leader declared: ''We are determined to strike back and continue our work.'' And as they do, they can count on the continued support of the United States.''

Many high-ranking officials were on hand for the funeral, including Iraq's interior and defense ministers and National Security Adviser Mouwaffak al-Rubaie.

''We condemn the killing of Abu Risha, but this will not deter us from helping the people of Anbar -- we will support them more than before,'' al-Rubaie declared. ''It is a national disaster and a great loss for the Iraqi people -- Abu Risha was the only person to confront al-Qaida in Anbar.''

But in open-air Friday prayers in the streets of Baghdad's Shiite slum Sadr City, a stronghold of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, imam Muhanned al-Gharawi told thousands of worshippers that the assassination was an example of the government's inability to provide security for Iraq.

''The Iraqi people have lost trust with this government and killings are still going on -- the latest is the assassination of the Anbar Awakening Council leader,'' he said. ''Everyone is threatened with death in this country as long as the American Black House is still giving the orders.''

In scattered violence around Iraq on Friday, a suicide truck bomb hit a police checkpoint near Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, killing four policemen, a Beiji police officer said.

South of Baghdad, unidentified gunmen killed three farmers who were taking their turn guarding a village, police said.

Farther south in the city of Hillah, gunmen attacked the home of Col. Hussein Ali Hassoon al Khafaji, an Iraqi army battalion commander, killing a guard and wounding another, police said.

In a helicopter assault mission west of Baghdad, three suspected insurgents were killed and three American soldiers were injured, the U.S. command said.

Iraqi soldiers led the raid Thursday on a mosque in Karmah, a town in Iraq's western Anbar province some 50 miles west of the capital, the U.S. military said in a statement. The target was a high-ranking al-Qaida in Iraq leader, believed to be responsible for orchestrating murders, sniper attacks and the planting of roadside bombs.

During the operation, people fleeing the mosque fired at American troops -- wounding three of them with non-life threatening injuries. U.S. and Iraqi forces retaliated with ground fire and close air support, killing three suspected insurgents, the military said.

The military statement did not say whether the targeted al-Qaida figure was among the dead.

Troops also discovered four rockets, roadside bomb-making materials and 50-caliber ammunition rounds inside the mosque, the statement said.

The U.S. command also released more details on the deadly Sept. 10 accident in Baghdad that killed seven soldiers, including two sergeants who helped write a New York Times op-ed article sharply critical of the Pentagon's assessment of the Iraq war.

Sgt. Omar Mora and Sgt. Yance T. Gray were among seven NCOs who wrote the Aug. 19 piece entitled ''The War As We Saw It'' expressing doubts about American gains in Iraq.

Another co-author, Staff Sgt. Jeremy Murphy, was shot in the head while the article was being written. The Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader flown to a military hospital in the United States and expected to survive.

The U.S. command said the accident occurred in the Baghdad suburb of Shula when soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade were in an armored transport truck on their way back from a raid in which they had captured three insurgents suspected of attacks on U.S. and Iraqi soldiers.

''The unit was returning to base after the raid when their vehicle apparently lost control and fell approximately 50 feet from a highway overpass,'' the military said in a statement.

------

An Associated Press employee in Ramadi contributed to this report but his name with withheld for security reasons.

    4 U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq Bombing, NYT, 14.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

Report: Iraqis Losing Religious Freedom

September 14, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:45 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Religious freedom has sharply deteriorated in Iraq over the past year because of the insurgency and violence targeting people of specific faiths, despite the U.S. military buildup intended to improve security, a State Department report said Friday.

The Annual Report on International Religious Freedom found the violence is not confined to the well-known rivalry between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

''The ongoing insurgency significantly harmed the ability of all religious believers to practice their faith,'' said the report released by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

In her remarks, Rice did not specifically address the situation in Iraq but said the report, covering 198 countries, was an important element of President Bush's efforts to promote religious freedom worldwide.

''Freedom of religion is integral to efforts to combat the ideology of hatred and intolerance that fuels global terrorism,'' she said.

Rice did not answer reporters' questions and turned the presentation over to John Hanford, the department's ambassador at large for international religious freedom, who also did not mention Iraq in his opening remarks.

''What we're dealing with in Iraq is really a security situation that makes it difficult for religious practice to occur in a normal way,'' he said in answer to a reporter's question. He added that Iraq's constitution guarantees religious freedom but said that was hampered by sectarian violence and that worshippers were getting caught in the ''crossfire'' of broader attacks.

The report, however, painted a starker picture in Iraq.

''Many individuals from various religious groups were targeted because of their religious identity or their secular leanings,'' the report said.

It found that members of all religions in Iraq are ''victims of harassment, intimidation, kidnapping, and killings'' and that ''frequent sectarian violence included attacks on places of worship.''

Muslims who practice less-strict versions of their faith suffer because ''conservative and extremist Islamic elements exert tremendous pressure on society to conform to their interpretations of Islam's precepts,'' the report said.

At the same time, it said, ''non-Muslims (are) especially vulnerable to pressure and violence, because of their minority status and, often, because of the lack of a protective tribal structure.''

Conditions worsened after the February 2006 bombing of a prized Shia mosque in the town of Samarra, the report said, and have continued to deteriorate over the past year.

''Terrorist attacks rendered many mosques, churches, and other holy sites unusable'' and others closed under threat of attack, the report said.

It listed 38 separate attacks perpetrated against adherents of various religions, many of them Christians, between July 2006 and June 2007. ''The magnitude of sectarian attacks on both Sunnis and Shia were also extremely high, albeit difficult to track,'' it said.

The report did not cover August 2007, when 520 people -- mainly members of the Yazidi community, a Kurdish-speaking religious minority -- were killed in quadruple suicide bombings blamed on al-Qaida in Iraq.

Outside of Iraq, the report also noted severe problems with religious freedom in a number of other Islamic or majority-Muslim nations, among them Afghanistan and Pakistan, both of which are U.S. allies in the war on terrorism.

-- Afghanistan: ''Decades of war, years of Taliban rule, and weak democratic institutions, including a developing judiciary, have contributed to intolerance manifested in acts of harassment and violence against reform-minded Muslims and religious minorities.''

-- Pakistan: Although the government has taken some steps to improve treatment of religious minorities, ''discriminatory legislation and the Government's failure to take action against societal forces hostile to those who practice minority faiths fostered religious intolerance, acts of violence, and intimidation against followers of certain religious groups.''

-- Saudi Arabia: In a country where faiths other than Islam are illegal, which usually comes in for harsh criticism on lack of religious freedom, the report noted some positive progress.

''While overall government policies continue to place severe restrictions on religious freedom, there were some improvements in specific areas during the period covered by this report,'' it said, noting nascent moves that ''could lead to important improvements in the future.''

    Report: Iraqis Losing Religious Freedom, NYT, 14.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq-Religious-Freedom.html

Military Analysis

Why Officers Differ on Troop Reduction

September 14, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 — The view of the way forward in Iraq that President Bush articulated on Thursday night was the same one that Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, has outlined in Washington all week.

It holds that the military effort there is showing signs of success, that too fast a withdrawal would be foolhardy, and that while the future will be difficult and full of setbacks, it is possible to envision that the American strategy will pay off in the future.

But that vision, which defers a firm decision on steeper reductions in the force, remains deeply unpopular to some current and retired officers, who say the White House and its battlefield commander are continuing to strain the troops, with little prospect of long-term success.

It is the second time in 10 months that Mr. Bush has opted for higher troop levels in Iraq than are favored by some of his senior military advisers. Among those who supported a smaller troop increase than the one Mr. Bush ordered last January were members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Now, some of his advisers would prefer setting a faster timetable for drawing the force back down.

Some even suggest that Mr. Bush’s portrayal of the strategy as relying heavily on recommendations from General Petraeus has been more than a little disingenuous, given that it was unlikely that a battlefield commander would repudiate his own plans.

“This approach can work for brief periods in many places, but it’s not a good long-term solution,” said Douglas A. Macgregor, a retired Army colonel and a critic of the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq. He called General Petraeus’s testimony “another deceitful attempt on the part of the generals and their political masters to extend our stay in the country long enough until Bush leaves office.”

General Petraeus told lawmakers during two days of Congressional testimony this week that his plan for reducing the American presence in Iraq by five combat brigades through mid-July was “fully supported” by Adm. William J. Fallon, the chief of Central Command and the senior American commander in the Middle East, as well as by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The general said, “There has been no recommendation I am aware of that would have laid out by any of those individuals a more rapid withdrawal.”

He acknowledged though that he and other top-ranking officers had begun “discussions about the pace of the mission transition,” a debate that remains unresolved and is likely to flare up again early next year, during a promised further review of additional troop cuts.

Among active-duty officers, the voices of skepticism about Mr. Bush’s approach have been more muted, but they have been significant. The officers who have pushed for deeper cuts have questioned whether his timetable — a drawdown to 15 combat brigades next July, from 20 now — would allow the Army to meet its minimum goal of giving soldiers at least a year at home for every year they are deployed.

Even before General Petraeus appeared before Congress this week, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, last week questioned the significance of what his colleague had achieved.

General Casey, who was General Petraeus’s predecessor as the top commander in Iraq, said that while the decision to send additional forces had produced a “tactical effect” and brought “a temporary and local impact on the security situation,” the “$64,000 question” was “whether the opportunities created by the military could be taken advantage of by the Iraqi political leadership.”

“I think a smaller force will cause Iraqis to do more faster,” General Casey added, speaking at a breakfast sponsored by Government Executive magazine.

Advisers close to General Petraeus say General Casey’s comments were hardly those of a disinterested observer, given that he was effectively dismissed from his post in Iraq as conditions worsened during his tenure.

But his critique goes beyond deeper. He and others on the Joint Chiefs of Staff contend that the current force levels in Iraq cannot be sustained, given the current size of the Army.

Among Mr. Bush’s other senior military advisers, differences about how deep the cuts should go appeared to have been set aside with the decision to postpone further decisions until next spring.

Admiral Fallon was said by some officers to believe that only by giving the Iraqi government a clearer sense that the American troop commitment was limited would the Iraqis take steps aimed at achieving reconciliation.

He also worries about having enough forces in reserve to handle contingencies outside Iraq and in Afghanistan.

Adm. Michael G. Mullen, the current chief of naval operations, who takes over as chairman of the Joint Chiefs next month, has also raised concerns about force levels, though he also cautions against a withdrawal before the current strategy is allowed to work.

The deeper doubts voiced by General Casey about the prospects for Iraqi reconciliation are shared by the retired general John P. Abizaid, who led the Central Command until January.

“It was clear that putting additional troops in would gain temporary security,” General Abizaid said in a rare interview on Tuesday with The Associated Press.

“What was not clear to me was what we were going to do diplomatically, economically, politically and informationally to make sure that we moved forward in a way that wasn’t just temporary.”

    Why Officers Differ on Troop Reduction, NYT, 14.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/washington/14military.html?hp

Number of Soldiers to Be Left in Iraq Remains Unclear

September 14, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 — Though President Bush said he would withdraw five Army combat brigades and several Marine units from Iraq by next summer, as the top commander in Iraq had recommended, the White House was careful on Thursday not to be pinned down on just how many soldiers would remain.

There are about 169,000 American troops in Iraq — that includes 20 combat brigades, a number that is to drop to 15 under the new plan — as well as a roughly equivalent number of support forces.

The announced withdrawals would remove the same number of combat units as were sent to Iraq as part of the increase in forces ordered by President Bush this year. But the White House said troop totals may not return to exactly 133,000, the number deployed before the so-called surge began early this year, because of the need to keep in place specialized units, like the military police and helicopter squadrons.

“It’s not a fixed number, because things change over time,” said a senior administration official, briefing reporters before the speech on the condition of anonymity.

Officials also said it was difficult to give a firm figure for how many soldiers there are in a combat brigade, noting that there can be from 3,500 to 4,500 soldiers, or even more.

“It’s not simply five brigades times 3,500, plus 2,000 here and 4,000 there,” the official said. “So if you ask for White House math, whatever number we give you, we can guarantee you one thing: that won’t be the right number.”

The administration official said Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior commander in Iraq, “won’t necessarily be taking out the exact five brigades that surged.”

“So, for example, today,” the official said, “would you expect him to take out a brigade along a sectarian fault line in Baghdad? No. He’s not going to create a vacuum there. He’ll take a brigade someplace where the security situation allows it.”

When the administration announced in January that it was sending the additional forces to Iraq, officials estimated the increase at roughly 20,000 troops, including 4,000 marines. The actual buildup ultimately amounted to more than 30,000 personnel, after counting combat support units and additional forces subsequently requested by General Petraeus.

As the reinforcements arrived month by month, the force level rose to slightly more than 160,000 by July. It is even higher now, but the current level is an artificial bulge, military officials said, because units just arriving for their tours in Iraq and others due to go home overlap as part of the normal exchange of equipment and responsibility.

But with a Marine Expeditionary Force and the first combat brigade due to come out later this year and not be replaced, the force total will fall below 160,000 in December.

One replacement Marine unit will not be far away, ready for action while at sea in the Persian Gulf region, an official said.

Troop levels have fluctuated since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The lowest level was reached in February 2004, at 115,000. Before the national elections in January 2005, more soldiers were sent in temporarily to provide security, briefly raising the total to about 160,000.

Troop totals for other countries assisting the American effort in Iraq have come down steadily, to just more than 11,000 now from a high of 25,600 in early 2004. The number of people in Iraqi Army and police units has risen to around 445,000, military officials said.

    Number of Soldiers to Be Left in Iraq Remains Unclear, NYT, 14.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/washington/14truthsquad.html

Bush Says Success Allows for Troop Cuts

September 14, 2007
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 — President Bush contended on Thursday night that his plan to begin withdrawing some troops from Iraq gradually was based on a principle he called “return on success,” saying that progress made so far could be squandered by the deeper and speedier reductions that the war’s opponents have demanded.

Mr. Bush called for an “enduring relationship” with Iraq that would keep American forces there “beyond my presidency,” arguing that a free and friendly Iraq was essential to the security of the region and the United States. He cast the war in Iraq as a vital part of a strategy in the Middle East to defeat Al Qaeda and counter Iran.

Evidently sensitive to how lower troop levels might be seen — by enemies abroad and critics at home — he emphasized in his address that early drawdowns were now possible only because the strategy of sending more troops to Iraq eight months ago had worked. He did not once use the word withdrawal.

“The more successful we are, the more American troops can return home,” Mr. Bush said, trying once again to win support for a war in Iraq that remains deeply unpopular.

The speech was the first time since the war began four and a half years ago that Mr. Bush had outlined a plan for troop reductions, to bring levels down from the current high of 169,000. He held out the prospect of more reductions but committed only to a plan that would withdraw by next July the additional combat units he ordered there in January, leaving a main body of more than 130,000 troops intact.

In the Democratic response, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a West Point graduate, said that Mr. Bush was making the case for an “endless and unlimited military presence in Iraq,” and he vowed that Congress would prevent it.

“Once again, the president failed to provide either a plan to successfully end the war or a convincing rationale to continue it,” said Mr. Reed, an author of a Democratic proposal that would withdraw most combat troops by next spring, but still leave a significant force in Iraq to provide training and security.

Mr. Bush’s 18-minute address culminated several weeks of political stagecraft that included several speeches and a presidential trip to Iraq but also relied heavily on Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, to make the public case for a strategy overseen by the commander in chief.

While promoting progress in Iraq, Mr. Bush conceded that his vision for Iraq would be a difficult one to achieve. That acknowledgment was punctuated with macabre timing by the assassination on Thursday of a Sunni sheik, Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, who had led a group of tribal leaders into an alliance with the United States and who had met the president during his trip to Iraq only 10 days ago.

The White House clearly sought to maximize the political benefits from the announcement of a troop reduction, which some military officials said would have had to happen anyway unless the administration took the politically unpalatable step of extending troops’ tours in Iraq to longer than 15 months. The first 5,700 troops affected by the pullback would leave Iraq this year — “by Christmas,” Mr. Bush said — and roughly 18,000 more would do so by mid-July 2008.

Still, other forces of what came to be called “the surge” could remain and new ones could be sent, administration and military officials said Thursday. As a result, the number of troops in Iraq could be higher in the summer of 2008 than it was in the fall of 2006 before the surge began, a fact likely to infuriate Mr. Bush’s critics and upset even some Republican supporters.

Mr. Bush’s approach sets the stage for a legislative clash beginning next week in the Senate as Democrats renew their efforts to put together a bipartisan coalition to win approval of legislation forcing a change in policy in Iraq. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said Mr. Bush was “trying to run out the clock on his failed strategy and leave the hard decisions to the next president.”

Many Democrats, including the presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, have said some American military presence should continue in Iraq beyond Mr. Bush’s presidency. But his critics take it for granted that Mr. Bush envisions a presence much bigger and longer than the Democrats would endorse.

Mr. Bush, in his remarks, seemed to hope that by beginning a withdrawal, it would mollify those who were increasingly alarmed by the size and cost of the commitment and unite Americans behind the war in a way they have rarely been from the start. “The way forward I have described tonight makes it possible, for the first time in years, for people who have been on opposite sides of this difficult debate to come together,” he said.

That seemed unlikely.

Democratic leaders did not wait for the formal remarks before they began to render a judgment. “He wants an open-ended commitment with an open wallet by the American people,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.

As he has in previous addresses, the president sought to recast, or at least rephrase, the war’s overarching purpose. While the war began with an American invasion of Iraq, Mr. Bush said the United States and Iraq’s current government had the same “moral and strategic imperatives” — to forge an alliance with political, economic and military ties.

“We must help Iraq defeat those who threaten its future and also threaten ours,” he said, citing the role played in Iraq by Iran and its allies, and by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the home-grown Sunni militant group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign-led. The extent of its links to Osama bin Laden’s network is unclear.

“If we were to be driven out of Iraq, extremists of all strains would be emboldened,” Mr. Bush said. “Al Qaeda could gain new recruits and new sanctuaries. Iran would benefit from the chaos and would be encouraged in its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and dominate the region. Extremists could control a key part of the global energy supply.”

At times, Mr. Bush offered a more upbeat assessment of conditions in Iraq than others have, including a flurry of reports that preceded Thursday’s speech. At times, his view seemed even rosier than General Petraeus’s did.

His descriptions noted positive developments — “Ordinary life is beginning to return,” he said — while leaving out the grim realities of life in the shadow of death, without basic regular electricity or other services.

He warned that pulling out of Iraq could cause “a humanitarian nightmare” but did not acknowledge that millions of Iraqis have already been displaced or have fled to neighboring countries.

He noted that Iraq’s government was “sharing oil revenues with the provinces” without mentioning that discussions on a draft law to institutionalize the process — a key benchmark dictated by Congress — appear to have collapsed.

Mr. Bush and other officials had pointed to the new alliance with the Sunni tribes in Anbar Province as one of the most hopeful developments in Iraq since the “surge” began. The national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, told the president of Sheik Abdul Sattar’s death just as Mr. Bush finished his daily political briefing on Thursday morning.

This week’s testimony of General Petraeus and the American ambassador in Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, had elated White House officials, who by midweek said they felt they would easily avoid any significant defections by Republican lawmakers and thus face no real legislative constraints in how the administration conducts the war.

Some Republican strategists, in fact, expressed concern that Mr. Bush even gave Thursday night’s speech, suggesting, on condition of anonymity to shield themselves from retribution, that it would have been better to let the general have the last word.

Still, it has been clear this week that the Democrats have too few votes to impose any real constraints on Mr. Bush’s policy, leaving the war’s harshest critics frustrated and angry. With so many troops remaining in Iraq well into 2008, the debate over the war is likely to intensify during the presidential campaign.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, on Thursday night expressed confidence that the Republicans could continue to block any effort to set a withdrawal date, and he said he believed that most of his colleagues were satisfied with the president’s approach.

“The plan General Petraeus has laid out meets a demand that many of my members have been looking for, which is some sign of success that will allow us to reduce our forces in the near future,” Mr. McConnell said.

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, on his way back from a two-day trip to Iraq, continued to herald signs of success he saw. But Mr. Boehner himself became part of the bitter debate over Iraq, saying in response to a question posed on CNN that “the investment that we’re making today will be a small price if we’re able to stop Al Qaeda here.”

Democrats seized on the remark, accusing him of demeaning the death toll in Iraq, which as of Wednesday stood at 3,765, though aides said he referred only to the financial costs.

    Bush Says Success Allows for Troop Cuts, NYT, 14.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/washington/14prexy.html?hp

Key Dates in Iraq War

September 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:37 p.m. ET
The New York Times

Key dates and events in the Iraq war:

2003:

March 17 -- President Bush gives Saddam Hussein 48-hour deadline to give up power. U.S.-led invasion of Iraq begins three days later.

May 1 -- On an aircraft carrier under a ''Mission Accomplished'' banner, President Bush declares ''major combat operations in Iraq have ended.''

Dec. 13 -- Saddam Hussein captured while hiding in hole in ground near Tikrit; hanged after trial.

------

2004:

April -- Photographs surface of prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

June 28 -- The U.S. occupation authority turns formal power over to the interim Iraqi government.

Oct. 6 -- Top U.S. arms inspector in Iraq finds no evidence that Saddam's regime produced weapons of mass destruction after 1991, discounting a main justification of the war.

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2005

May 3 -- The first democratically elected Iraqi government sworn in.

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2006

Feb. 23 -- At least 136 Iraqis are killed in sectarian violence a day after an explosion destroys the dome of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra.

Nov. 7 -- In U.S. congressional elections widely viewed as a referendum on the war, Republicans lose control of both the House and Senate.

Nov. 8 -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigns; Bush nominates former CIA director Robert Gates as successor.

Dec. 31 -- American deaths in the Iraq war reaches 3,000.

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2007

Jan. 10 -- Bush commits more than 21,500 additional American troops to Iraq -- a military buildup that has grown to 30,000 with support troops.

July 12 -- White House report required by Congress says Iraq has made satisfactory progress on eight of 18 political and security benchmarks, unsatisfactory progress on eight and that it's too early to judge progress on two.

(This version CORRECTS date of two items from 2005 to 2006.)

    Key Dates in Iraq War, NYT, 13.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-Iraq-Chronology.html

Sheik Led Sunni Fight Against Al - Qaida

September 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:34 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Visitors often streamed in and out of Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha's walled compound in Ramadi, where he had several villas and a stock of camels just across the street from the city's largest American base.

Smoking profusely, Abu Risha -- sporting a pistol at his waist -- would take endless calls on his cell phone. Lines of people waited to see the clan leader, including locals, tribal sheiks and Americans. He had near-daily meetings with American military officers.

The demand was a sign of the young sheik's swift rise to become the lynchpin of the American strategy of turning Iraq's Sunni tribes against al-Qaida. But his position also brought him enemies: Al-Qaida in Iraq tried repeatedly to kill him, and some Sunnis saw him as an opportunist who took U.S. cash to build himself up.

His importance to the U.S. was made clear by a Sept. 3 meeting with President Bush. On a surprise visit to Anbar province, Bush posed for photos with Abu Risha, who cut the figure of an Arab prince, with an immaculate gold-rimmed robe and a meticulously groomed goatee and a heavy mustache.

Ten days later, Abu Risha -- in his late 30s -- was killed along with two bodyguards by a roadside bomb near his compound. His death may prove a setback to American success in Anbar, once a stronghold of the Sunni Arab insurgency and now cited as a model for the rest of Iraq.

A year ago, Abu Risha launched his campaign to rally other tribes behind him to fight al-Qaida militants. The fight was personal: 10 of his relatives, including four of his brothers, were killed by al-Qaida for dealing with the U.S. military.

Desperate for a success story in an increasingly unpopular war, the U.S. military embraced Abu Risha. Iraq's government grudgingly followed suit, despite its fear of boosting another armed group that could turn against it. The result was a dramatic decrease in violence in Anbar.

''A year ago the province was assessed 'lost' politically,'' Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told a congressional hearing Monday. ''Today, it is a model of what happens when local leaders and citizens decide to oppose al-Qaida and reject its Taliban-like ideology.''

After Abu Risha's meeting with Bush, the government quickly allocated an additional $70 million to Anbar's budget. Some areas of the province receive as much as 20 hours of electricity daily compared to only 2 in most of Baghdad.

Abu Risha was eager to spread the fight against al-Qaida to other parts of the country.

''We have worked with all the tribes of the south,'' he said in a recent interview with Al-Jazeera English, aired Sunday. ''I have worked with all Iraqi tribes and they are all under my leadership.''

Abu Risha belonged to a small clan of the Dulaimi tribe, Anbar's largest, and was one of a number of young leaders who rose up as Sunni tribal elders fled or were killed in the province. He ran a construction and import-export family business with offices in Jordan and Dubai.

He was usually greeted with chants of support every time he showed up on the streets of Ramadi, the war-ravaged provincial capital 70 miles west of Baghdad.

''We owe Abu Risha and his people for giving us back our lives,'' said Saad Ibrahim, who runs a falafel eatery in Ramadi where he says al-Qaida fighters ruled supreme until driven out by men from Abu Risha's Anbar Awakening Council.

Little is known of Abu Risha's past before his anti-Qaida campaign. Many of Anbar's clans benefited from money from ousted leader Saddam Hussein.

The oldest of Abu Risha's three children is a 12-year-old boy called Saddam -- though that is not necessarily evidence of his politics. Thousands of parents named their newborns after the former dictator either out of admiration or to deflect the attention of regime informants.

Among Abu Risha's chief rivals in Anbar was Ali Hatem al-Suleiman, another leader in the Duleimi tribe.

''Clans that cooperated with the British nearly a century ago still live in shame,'' al-Suleiman told the AP by telephone Wednesday, referring to Britain's period of colonial rule in Iraq. ''Only a mercenary would meet with Bush, who had no business coming to Anbar anyway.''

------

Associated Press correspondent Todd Pitman contributed to this report.

    Sheik Led Sunni Fight Against Al - Qaida, NYT, 13.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Obit-Abu-Risha.html

Bomb Kills Sunni Sheik Working With U.S. in Iraq

September 13, 2007
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN and GRAHAM BOWLEY

BAGHDAD, Sept. 13 — The leader of a group of local Sunni tribes cooperating with American and Iraqi forces in fighting extremist Sunni militants in Anbar Province was killed by a bomb today, Iraqi police officials said, in a blow to an effort President Bush has held up as a model of progress.

The Sunni leader, Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, who met and shook hands with Mr. Bush during his visit to a military base in the province last week, led the Anbar Salvation Council, an alliance of clans supporting the Iraqi government and American forces. Initial reports suggested he was killed either by a bomb in his car or by a roadside bomb close to his car near his home in Ramadi in Anbar Province, the sprawling region west of Baghdad.

Sheik Abdul Sattar, 35, as he was known to Iraqis and American commanders, had become the public face of the Sunni Arab tribes in lawless Anbar Province who turned against the Sunni jihadists of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and began to fight on the side of the Shiite-led Iraqi government and the American military.

The progress in Anbar became one of the rare bright spots for the American military in Iraq. In the trip last week, Mr. Bush chose to stop in Anbar rather than Baghdad and forcefully directed attention at the security gains the growing alliance between American and tribal forces had brought. Sheik Abdul Sattar was among the tribal leaders who met with him on Sept. 3 at al-Asad Air Base in Anbar. The White House condemned the killing, saying Sheikh Abdul Sattar’s actions exemplified “the courage and determination of the Iraqi people,” a spokeswoman, Katherine L. Starr, said in a statement.

“His death also reminds us that the struggle will require continued perseverance, and the Iraqis are increasingly turning away from Al Qaeda, as a result of such extreme acts of violence,” Ms. Starr said.

His was the latest and most prominent assassination of a tribal leader involved in the effort to fight Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is led by foreigners. The extent of its links to Osama bin Laden’s network is not clear.

His death comes as Mr. Bush prepares to discuss his Iraq strategy in a nationwide address in the United States this evening.

It could be a significant setback for American efforts to work more closely with local tribes against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Recently the council had begun to reach out to other tribes to bring them into closer cooperation with the American and Iraqi government, and had met recently with southern Shiite leaders.

The authorities imposed a state of emergency in Anbar Province after his assassination, police officials said. At least one other person escorting him was also killed in the explosion.

“This action makes a crack and makes it a mess for all those who wanted to be aligned with him,” said Salim al-Jubouri, a spokesman for the largest Sunni Arab block in the Iraqi Parliament. “I believe there are other leaders who will take this on, but this is not easy.”

Just last year some senior military officers had all but given up on bringing security to Anbar. But since then, the Sunni sheiks banded together to fight militants loyal to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and supply young men to the police, an effort that brought a significant turnabout and has allowed the American military to claim some success. With many of the Sunni sheiks calling on their followers to join the Iraqi Army and the police, and declaring the Qaeda group a common enemy of Iraqi Sunnis, levels of violence across much of Anbar dropped sharply, especially in the capital, Ramadi, and in towns along the Euphrates.

American commanders have acknowledged that the strategy was fraught with risk since some of the Sunni groups have been suspected of involvement in past attacks on American troops or of having links to such groups.

Some of the groups, American commanders say, have been provided with arms, ammunition, cash, fuel and supplies, usually through Iraqi military units allied with the Americans.

American officers who have engaged in what they call outreach to the Sunni groups have said that many of them had past links to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia but had grown disillusioned with the Islamic militants’ extremist tactics, particularly suicide bombings that have killed thousands of civilians.

In exchange for American support, these officials say, the Sunni groups agreed to fight Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and halt attacks on American units. But critics of the strategy, including some American officers, have said it could amount to the Americans’ arming both sides in a future civil war.

But the close association with the American military has come at a cost to the tribal leaders. In May, masked gunmen in the volatile city of Falluja assassinated a prominent Sunni tribal leader, Allawi al-Issawi, who had joined the opposition to the terrorist groups linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Less than three hours later, as mourners gathered for a funeral procession outside his home, a suicide bomber drove into the crowd, killing at least 27 people and wounding dozens of others.

In June, a suicide bomber assassinated four Sunni sheiks who were cooperating with Americans in Anbar Province, detonating an explosive belt as they gathered inside a large Baghdad hotel.

In July, a suicide truck bombing north of Baghdad was again apparently aimed at a meeting of Sunni tribal sheiks who had recently agreed to oppose extremists allied with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Five people were killed in that attack and 12 wounded, Interior Ministry officials said. It was unclear whether any sheiks were victims.

    Bomb Kills Sunni Sheik Working With U.S. in Iraq, NYT, 13.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/world/middleeast/13cnd-iraq.html?hp

2 Soldiers Who Wrote About Life in Iraq Are Killed

September 12, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 — “Engaging in the banalties of life has become a death-defying act,” the seven soldiers wrote of the war they had seen in Iraq.

They were referring to the ordeals of Iraqi citizens, trying to go about their lives with death and suffering all around them. They did not know it at the time, but they might almost have been referring to themselves.

Two of the soldiers who wrote of their pessimism about the war, in an Op-Ed article that appeared in The New York Times on Aug. 19, were killed in Baghdad on Monday. They were not killed in combat, nor on a daring mission. They died when the five-ton cargo truck they were riding in overturned.

The victims, Staff Sgt. Yance T. Gray, 26, and Sgt. Omar Mora, 28, were among the authors of “The War as We Saw It,” in which they expressed doubts about reports of progress.

“As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day,” the soldiers wrote.

“My son was a soldier in his heart from the age of 5,” Sergeant Gray’s mother, Karen Gray, said by telephone today from Ismay, Mont., where Yance grew up. “He loved what he was doing.”

“But he wasn’t any mindless robot,” said the sergeant’s father, Richard Gray. Sergeant Gray leaves a wife, Jessica, and a daughter, Ava, born in April. He is also survived by a brother and sister.

Sergeant Mora’s mother, Olga Capetillo of Texas City, Tex., told The Daily News in Galveston that her son had grown increasingly gloomy about Iraq. “I told him God is going to take care of him and take him home,” she said.

A native of Ecuador, Sergeant Mora had recently become an American citizen. “He was proud of this country, and he wanted to go over and help,” his stepfather, Robert Capetillo, told The Houston Chronicle. Sergeant Mora leaves a wife, Christa, and a daughter, Jordan, who is 5. Survivors also include a brother and sister.

While the seven soldiers were composing their article, one of them, Staff Sgt. Jeremy A. Murphy, was shot in the head. He was flown to a military hospital in the United States and is expected to survive. The other authors were Buddhika Jayamaha, an Army specialist, and Sgts. Wesley D. Smith, Jeremy Roebuck and Edward Sandmeier.

“We need not talk about our morale,” they wrote in closing. “As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.”

    2 Soldiers Who Wrote About Life in Iraq Are Killed, NYT, 12.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/washington/12cnd-troops.html

Officials: Bush to Announce Troop Cut

September 11, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:18 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush will tell the nation Thursday evening that he plans to reduce the American troop presence in Iraq by as many as 30,000 by next summer but will condition those and further cuts on continued progress, The Associated Press has learned.

In a 15-minute address from the White House at 9 p.m. EDT, Bush will endorse the recommendations of his top general and top diplomat in Iraq, following their appearance at two days of hearings in Congress, administration officials said. The White House plans to issue a written status report on the troop buildup on Friday, they said.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Bush's speech is not yet final. Bush was rehearsing and polishing his remarks even as the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker were presenting their arguments for a second day on Capitol Hill.

In the speech, the president will say he understands Americans' deep concerns about U.S. involvement in Iraq and their desire to bring the troops home, they said. Bush will say that, after hearing from Petraeus and Crocker, he has decided on a way forward that will reduce the U.S. military presence but not abandon Iraq to chaos, according to the officials.

The address will stake out a conciliatory tone toward Congress. But while mirroring Petraeus' strategy, Bush will place more conditions on reductions than his general did, insisting that conditions on the ground must warrant cuts and that now-unforeseen events could change the plan.

Petraeus recommended that a 2,000-member Marine unit return home this month without replacement. That would be followed in mid-December with the departure of an Army brigade numbering 3,500 to 4,000 soldiers. Under the general's plan, another four combat brigades would be withdrawn by July 2008.

That could leave the U.S. with as few as 130,000-135,000 troops in Iraq, down from about 168,000 now, although Petraeus was not precise about whether all the about 8,000 support troops sent with those extra combat forces would be withdrawn by July.

Petraeus said he foresaw even deeper troop cuts beyond July, but he recommended that Bush wait until at least March to decide when to go below 130,000 -- and at what pace.

At the White House, Bush met with House and Senate lawmakers of both parties and he publicly pledged to consider their views. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the president didn't talk about the nationwide address.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush appears poised merely to bring the country back to where it was before the election that put Democrats in control of Congress -- with 130,000 troops in Iraq.

''Please. It's an insult to the intelligence of the American people that that is a new direction in Iraq,'' she said. ''We're as disappointed as the public is that the president has a tin ear to their opinion on this war.''

In his speech, Bush will adopt Petraeus' call for more time to determine the pace and scale of future withdrawals and offer to report to Congress in March, one official said.

As Petraeus and Crocker have, Bush will acknowledge difficulties, and the fact that few of the benchmarks set by Congress to measure progress of the buildup have been met, the official said. Yet, he will stress that a precipitous U.S. withdrawal would be a catastrophe for Iraq and U.S. interests.

The president will discuss ''bottom up'' security improvements, notably in Anbar Province, which he visited on Labor Day and where Sunni leaders have allied themselves with U.S. forces to fight insurgents. And, he will note incremental progress on the political front despite unhelpful roles played by Iran and Syria, the official said.

Crocker was particularly keen on detailing diplomatic developments, including Saudi Arabia's move to open an embassy in Baghdad and a third conference of Iraqi neighbors to be hosted by Turkey in Istanbul at the end of October.

In Congress, cracks in Republican support for the Iraq war remained, as epitomized by heated questioning Tuesday of Petraeus.

''Is this a mission shift?'' asked Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. ''Are we continuing down the same path that we have laid out before, entirely reliant on the ability of the Iraqis to come together to achieve that political reconciliation?''

Sen. Norm Coleman said he wants a longer-term vision other than suggestions that Petraeus and Crocker return to Capitol Hill in mid-March to give another assessment. ''Americans want to see light at the end of the tunnel,'' said Coleman, R-Minn.

Many rank-and-file Republicans say they are deeply uneasy about keeping troops in Iraq through next summer, but they also remain reluctant to embrace legislation ordering troops home by next spring. Democrats, under substantial pressure by voters and politically influential anti-war groups, had anticipated that a larger number of Republicans by now would have turned against Bush on the war because of grim poll numbers and the upcoming 2008 elections.

Indeed, Petraeus' testimony helped to solidify support elsewhere in the GOP, keeping Democrats far from the 60 votes they needed to pass legislation ordering troops home.

''Americans should be happy that we can begin to reduce troop levels months ahead of schedule,'' said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.

''I'm optimistic that when the votes are counted, they'll be roughly the same as they have been all year,'' said McConnell, the Senate Republican leader. ''As you know, we've lost some, but not a lot and I think that's a likely outcome again.''

Echoing testimony given to the House on Monday, Petraeus and Crocker acknowledged that Iraq remains largely dysfunctional but said violence had decreased since the influx of added U.S. troops.

Crocker said he fears that announcing troop withdrawals, as Democrats want, would focus Iraqi attention on ''building the walls, stocking ammunition and getting ready for a big nasty street fight'' rather than working toward reconciliation. ''It will take longer than we initially anticipated'' for Iraq's leaders to address the country's problems, he said.

The two days of testimony seemed to turn the debate away from the list of 18 benchmarks by which the White House and Iraq's government had said earlier this year that they preferred to measure progress. The administration has protested more recently that the benchmarks offer an unrealistic or incomplete look at the situation.

The hearing fell on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In an unusual admission, Petraeus said he was not sure whether his proposal on Iraq would make America safer.

A visibly heated Sen. John Warner, R-Va., asked the question to which Petraeus said: ''Sir, I don't know, actually. I have not sat down and sorted that out in my mind. What I have focused on and riveted on is how to accomplish the mission of the multinational force Iraq.''

    Officials: Bush to Announce Troop Cut, NYT, 11.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Iraq.html

Thousands of GIs Cope With Brain Damage

September 10, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:41 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- The war in Iraq is not over, but one legacy is already here in this city and others across America: an epidemic of brain-damaged soldiers.

Thousands of troops have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, or TBI. These blast-caused head injuries are so different from the ones doctors are used to seeing from falls and car crashes that treating them is as much faith as it is science.

''I've been in the field for 20-plus years dealing with TBI. I have a very experienced staff. And they're saying to me, 'We're seeing things we've never seen before,''' said Sandy Schneider, director of Vanderbilt University's brain injury rehabilitation program.

Doctors also are realizing that symptoms overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder, and that both must be treated. Odd as it may seem, brain injury can protect against PTSD by blurring awareness of what happened.

But as memory improves, emotional problems can emerge: One of the first ''graduates'' of Vanderbilt's program committed suicide three weeks later.

''Of all the ones here, he would not have been the one we would have thought,'' Schneider said. ''They called him the Michelangelo of Fort Campbell'' -- a guy who planned to go to art school.

As more troops return from the war, brain injuries are a growing burden -- for them, for the few programs to treat them, and for taxpayers who pay for their care and disability if they cannot hold jobs.

Most TBIs are mild, and most of these patients recover within a year. But one-fifth of the troops with these mild injuries will have prolonged or lifelong symptoms and need continuing care, the military estimates. Nearly all of the moderate and severe ones will, too.

Though the full number of those suffering from TBI is still unknown, the problem is straining the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Until now, ''they were dealing with a cohort of aging veterans with diabetes, heart disease, lung disease,'' said Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and a VA adviser.

Now, these young, brain-injured troops need highly specialized care, and how much it will help long-term is unknown, he said.

People with TBI have frequent headaches, dizziness, and trouble concentrating and sleeping. They may be depressed, irritable and confused, and easily provoked or distracted. Speech or vision also can be impaired.

Some sufferers have been misdiagnosed with personality disorders. Others have lost jobs because of unrecognized and untreated symptoms.

''It's the so-called invisible injury. It's where a troop takes 10 times the normal time to pack his rucksack ... a complicated injury to the most complicated part of the body,'' said Dr. Alisa Gean, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco.

Diagnosing it is imprecise -- damage rarely shows up on CAT scans or other tests.

Treating it is even more difficult. Lacking a cure, doctors focus on symptoms -- headaches, anxiety, vision problems, etc. But they lack good treatments for some of these, too, and are considering some experimental approaches being pushed by private companies with little proof they work.

Many troops get no care at all. Some are sent back to fight with their brain injuries undetected, especially if they had no obvious wounds.

What happened to Eric O'Brien and Bryan Malone shows the scope of this problem.

------

O'Brien, a 32-year-old Army staff sergeant from Iowa's Quad Cities, was teasing Malone, 22, a specialist from Haughton, La., in a Baghdad gym last summer.

''I told him and his workout partner: 'Put some more weight on it,''' prompting the men to get up. Seconds later, a rocket hit where they had sat. They survived, but a pressure wave from the blast coursed through their brains.

''I patted myself down head to toe, making sure I wasn't missing a limb,'' and felt odd, like ''I must be missing a chunk of my head,''' O'Brien said. He remembers little else except walking through debris to pick up his iPod and sunglasses.

As for Malone, an air conditioning vent had fallen on his head and he had shrapnel wounds. He had multiple surgeries, spent several months in Walter Reed Army Medical Center and now has titanium mesh reinforcing his skull.

O'Brien, however, had shrapnel removed from his scalp and then was sent back to his unit -- ''no antibiotics, no pain medication or anything. They just sent me on my way.''

When he later complained of pain, doctors gave him Motrin. When he discovered a trickle of blood from his hip, they said he would be fine. Six weeks later, when he could barely walk, tests revealed shrapnel in his hip. By then, he was having headaches and trouble sleeping.

O'Brien had been through multiple previous explosions -- troops average one a month, a study found -- and each raises the risk that the next one will do harm. Soldiers and Marines are proud and reluctant to go ''off mission'' just because ''they get their bell rung,'' said Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, a top Defense Department physician.

''Most of the treatment is explaining the situation and giving the tincture of time -- giving it time to heal,'' he said. If no big symptoms appear in eight to 12 hours, ''they're probably ready to go back.''

Officers also face pressure to return troops to duty, said Jordan Grafman, a neuroscientist who studies TBI at the National Institutes of Health.

''People don't want to lose these guys from their command -- they can't replace them fast enough,'' he said.

During a surprise visit to Iraq with President Bush on Labor Day, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the military was ''much smarter about this now,'' and urged troops to watch for signs of TBI and post-traumatic stress.

''They are every bit as much battle injuries as is a bullet or shrapnel. It is OK, it is OK to seek help for those kinds of war wounds, and I ask you all to help your buddies understand what you see in them,'' he said.

But that was long after O'Brien was hurt. His TBI was not diagnosed for months, until his hip injury landed him back at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. By then, the Army needed help treating TBI and was contracting with private rehab centers like Schneider's at Vanderbilt.

Malone and O'Brien had become friends, helping each other cope with wounds.

''They were sent to us together,'' Schneider said.

------

''I'll need to get milk and bread and eggs. Milk and bread and eggs. Next thing you know, I drive right by Wal-Mart,'' O'Brien said.

''I can vaguely tell you what we talked about at the beginning of this conversation,'' Malone said.

Memory trouble is a common sign of TBI. It isn't like Alzheimer's disease, where people are so disconnected from reality that they forget things like how a key works or where they live. It isn't like amnesia, where a chunk of the past is missing.

''I don't have any problem remembering the past. I have trouble with now,'' O'Brien said.

Multiple or complex tasks confound and irritate people with TBI. Therapists challenge them through exercises, like a computer game where they run a hot dog stand and must manage inventory, set prices, do banking and anticipate demand according to the weather.

Other therapy focuses on life skills like following directions while paying attention to something else.

''I counted three trash cans,'' O'Brien announced after a scouting mission to find landmarks using a map and tally cans along the way.

''I counted five,'' said therapist Jenny Owens.

Improving these skills is key to living a normal life, especially driving.

''Most of them don't drive. A van brings them down. They were hitting mailboxes, they'd get lost. We draw them maps and they forget when they're supposed to be here,'' Schneider said.

The Army gives some injured soldiers Palm Pilots -- handheld computers to help manage their lives.

''It costs them more for us to miss two appointments than to give us one of these,'' O'Brien explained.

But devices and mental exercises do only so much. Troops must be able to use information and reason, but TBI keeps many from being aware of their gaps.

''They don't realize their judgment is impaired,'' said Vanderbilt neuropsychologist Elizabeth Fenimore.

The training that helped them in combat situations is hurting them now.

''These guys are taught to be alert all the time,'' so they sleep poorly, Schneider said.

''Their nervous system becomes acclimated to being constantly on alert -- fight or flight,'' Fenimore said.

Malone knows it well.

''I worry about every little thing -- people breaking into my house, loud booms ... I'm jumpy,'' he said.

------

''I'm going to Afghanistan next year,'' said O'Brien, determined to stay in the Army and support his two daughters, who live with his ex-wife in Texas.

''I'm trying,'' added Malone. ''They're telling me they don't think my brain can take it. I think, 'Why don't you let me decide?'''

Doctors don't know whether either will return. But after all they've been through, if one does and the other does not, ''it's going to be tough,'' Malone said. ''It's going to be tough for whichever one stays back.''

------

Associated Press writer Christine Simmons in Washington contributed to this report.

------

On the Net:

Centers for Disease Control:

http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/tbi.htm

National Institutes of Health:

http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/tbi/detail--tbi.htm

    Thousands of GIs Cope With Brain Damage, NYT, 10.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Coming-Home-Wounded-Brain-Injuries.html

Slow Progress Being Made in Iraq, Petraeus Tells Congress

September 10, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 — Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American military commander in Iraq, told Congress this afternoon that the United States by next summer should be able to reduce its troop strength there to about 130,000, or what it was before the recent increase.

Returning to the “pre-surge” strength by pulling out 30,000 troops could probably be done without jeopardizing the hard-won progress made in Iraq, General Petraeus told House members at an emotionally charged hearing that was in some ways reminiscent of the Vietnam era. He said no decision on further withdrawals should be made until next March.

The gradual pullback of American troops should begin this month with the withdrawal of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is based at Camp Pendleton, Calif., General Petraeus said. He said he had recommended that move to President Bush.

The general, whose testimony today was the most eagerly awaited appearance in decades by a military leader on Capitol Hill, said he envisioned the United States achieving “success” in Iraq, “although doing so will be neither quick nor easy.”

Iraq continues to be torn by foreign and home-grown terrorists and plain thugs, the general said. Syria and Iran continue to meddle in Iraq, he said. And continued competition among sectarian groups in Iraq is inevitable; the overriding is whether that competition will continue to be violent, as it has been for many months, the general said.

General Petraeus, appearing before a joint session of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the House Armed Services Committee, delivered a report that mixed descriptions of slow, modest progress in pacifying Iraq with a prediction that many tough days lies ahead.

The American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, offered a similarly sobering assessment, declaring that Iraq is now “a traumatized society” and will remain so for a long time.

The military objectives of the troop increase ordered by President Bush earlier this year, known as the surge, are “in large measure being met,” General Petraeus told the lawmakers, some of whom were openly skeptical. But while terrorists have been weakened, “Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq remain strong,” he said.

Feelings ran high, as some antiwar hecklers chanted “Generals lie, children die,” before Representative Ike Skelton, the Missouri Democrat who heads the armed services panel, decreed, “Out they go!” and warned that anyone else who disrupted the hearing would be prosecuted. But there were further disruptions, with at least one screaming demonstrator hustled out of the room as General Petraeus praised the American troops in Iraq as “a new greatest generation.”

The essence of General Petraeus’s testimony had been forecast for days, so his projections on troop strength were no surprise. But his appearance with Ambassador Crocker was nonetheless dramatic, as Democrats and Republicans alike praised the two men as outstanding public servants while differing sharply on the policy that they were to testify about.

Inevitably, General Petraeus has become a figure of controversy. His supporters have described him as a brilliant general who, literally, wrote the Army’s book on counterterrorism. His detractors have accused him of being little more than a shill for President Bush’s policies.

Democratic leaders on the panels described the general and the envoy as good people shackled to a bad policy, while Republicans said General Petraeus in particular had been subjected to insulting and unfair criticism by people unwilling to even hear his testimony before rushing to judgment.

“He’s the right person, three years too late and 250,000 troops short,” Mr. Skelton said of the general and the general’s predicament, as he sees it.

But Representative Duncan Hunter of California, the armed services panel’s ranking Republican, said it was “an outrage” and “against the traditions of this great House” that some lawmakers seemed to have made up their minds already.

Among the examples of progress that General Petraeus cited was a lessening of bloodshed in Anbar Province, not so long ago one of the most violence-torn regions of Iraq.

And Mr. Crocker said the continued meddling of Iran and Syria was offset by a bit of good diplomatic news: Saudi Arabia intended to open an embassy in Baghdad for the first time since the Saddam Hussein era.

    Slow Progress Being Made in Iraq, Petraeus Tells Congress, NYT, 10.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/washington/10cnd-policy.html?hp

Seven Americans Are Killed in Iraq

September 7, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:21 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Four U.S. Marines were killed in fighting in Anbar province, and three soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in northern Iraq, the military said Friday.

Britain's Defense Ministry announced Friday the death of British soldier killed two days earlier. It gave no details on where or how the soldier died.

The four Marines assigned to Multi National Force -- West were killed Thursday in combat in Anbar, a predominantly Sunni province west of Baghdad that has seen a recent drop in violence, according to a statement.

Three Task Force Lightning soldiers also were killed Thursday when a bomb exploded near their vehicle in the northern Ninevah province, the military said separately.

The deaths raised to at least 3,760 members of the U.S. military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

The British soldier killed was a member of the Parachute Regiment, the Ministry of Defense said. News of the death had been kept secret for more than two days for security reasons, the ministry said.

A total of 169 British armed forces personnel or civilian employees of the military have died in Iraq during the war, according to the ministry.

About 100 miles west of Anbar's capital city of Ramadi, insurgents blew up two suspension bridges on roads leading to Jordan and Saudi Arabia, a police intelligence officer said on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

A roadside bomb struck an Iraqi army patrol near Baqouba, killing one soldier and wounding two, while another roadside bomb killed one civilian and wounded four others southeast of Baghdad, police officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

Gunmen also opened fire on Sunni worshippers in a drive-by shooting following evening prayers late Thursday in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing at least three people and wounding four, police Col. Anwar Qadir said.

In operations Thursday and Friday, U.S. forces killed three al-Qaida in Iraq suspects and detained 18 others, the military said.

The three men were killed in an operation Friday morning targeting a suspected al-Qaida in Iraq leader north of Baghdad. Four other suspects were detained in that raid and ground forces destroyed four vehicles, the U.S. military said in a statement.

Anbar, where the Marines were killed, is a vast desert province that stretches west from Baghdad to the borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. It has been a Sunni insurgent stronghold but attacks against U.S. forces and Iraqis have tapered off since many Sunni tribal leaders joined forces with the United States against al-Qaida in Iraq.

The Iraqi government announced Thursday it was adding millions of dollars to the budget of the western province of Anbar to help rebuild the region.

The step came days after a surprise visit to the province by President Bush to Anbar where he met top Iraqi officials as well as tribal leaders.

During a conference held Thursday in the provincial capital of Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, the government allocated additional $70 million to the Anbar budget, Interior Ministry official Col. Tariq Mohammed Youssef said. He added that 6,000 jobs will be created for Anbar residents, although he did not give more specifics.

Another $50 million was allocated to compensate citizens who suffered from military operations.

Among those at the conference was Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, and Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.

Top tribal leaders from Anbar were also present, including Abdul-Sattar al-Rishawi, head of the Anbar Salvation Council that spearheaded the fight against al-Qaida.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have touted Anbar as a success story in Iraq even as criticism mounts over the Iraqi government's efforts to achieve political reconciliation on other fronts.

A series of recent reports have offered a grim assessment of Iraq's political climate and the performance of its security forces as the U.S. ambassador and the top commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus prepare for congressional hearings beginning Monday.

An independent panel led by retired Marine Gen. James Jones recommended that the Iraqis assume more control of their nation's security and that U.S. forces, seen as an occupying and permanent force, should step back. Its report, presented to Congress on Thursday, contended that ''significant reductions, consolidations and realignments would appear to be possible and prudent.''

The Jones panel also found that Iraq's security forces would be unable to take control in the next 12 months to 18 months and recommended that its national police force be scrapped and entirely rebuilt because of corruption and sectarianism.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, reported Tuesday that Iraq has failed to meet 11 of its 18 political and security goals.

U.S. troop levels -- currently at a record 168,000 -- are expected to hit a high of 172,000 in the coming weeks, the Pentagon said Thursday.

Associated Press writer Bassem Mroue contributed to this report.

    Seven Americans Are Killed in Iraq, NYT, 7.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html?hp

After Talks With Bush, Maliki Visits Top Shiite Cleric to Discuss Plans

September 6, 2007
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

BAGHDAD, Sept. 5 — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, under significant American pressure to break the stalemate in Iraq’s government, flew to the holy city of Najaf on Wednesday for talks with the country’s top Shiite cleric.

The meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who as Iraq’s most powerful religious leader influences millions of Iraqi Shiites, took place two days after Mr. Maliki met President Bush on an air base in western Iraq.

In Najaf, Mr. Maliki said Mr. Bush had “carried a message of support to the Iraqi government.”

Mr. Maliki last met with Ayatollah Sistani in October, during a disagreement with the prime minister’s American supporters over his progress in stabilizing the country, particularly in reining in militias. A delegation of senior government officials met with the ayatollah in December.

“I came here carrying a message of Iraq and the Iraqi government,” Mr. Maliki said after the meeting. “I raised before him my viewpoints to form a government of technocrats.”

Mr. Bush’s top officials in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, will deliver to Congress next week a broad assessment of American policy in Iraq, and a central focus will be the effectiveness of Mr. Maliki’s government.

Elsewhere in the country, bombs killed four United States soldiers, the American military said in a statement. Two died in eastern Baghdad, despite a call by the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr for Shiite militants to lay down their weapons. The other two were killed in Salahuddin Province north of Baghdad.

Four soldiers were wounded in the blasts, the military said.

A bomb near a bus station in the eastern Baghdad neighborhood of Baladiyat killed four civilians and wounded more than a dozen, witnesses said. Accounts of the death toll varied, with The Associated Press reporting that 13 had been killed in the blast.

Mr. Maliki also spoke of the Shiite-on-Shiite violence that left scores dead last week during a Shiite religious festival in the southern city of Karbala, saying that no religious place should be protected by armed guards, but instead by the Iraqi Army at a distance. The fighting spread when rival Shiite militias fought each other near a holy shrine.

“This idea will avoid a lot of problems for us, and this is what I am going to discuss with local authorities in Najaf and in Karbala,” he said.

The American military said it had captured a “highly sought individual” whom it suspected of belonging to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Soldiers captured the man in a raid before dawn in Karbala. The military said it suspected him of coordinating the transport of Iraqis into Iran for training in insurgency tactics and of aiding militants in Baghdad.

The soldiers also seized computers, communication devices, documents and photographs.

Mr. Maliki said again that he was considering replacing Sunni ministers who, in protest of what they say is the Maliki government’s sectarianism, walked out of his cabinet, contributing to the current political paralysis. But he said he was still working hard to bring them back into the fold.

“If they decide not to go back, then the posts can’t remain vacant,” he said, “and we will choose ministers according to the standards of competence.”

New U.N. Envoy to Iraq

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 5 — Staffan de Mistura, a veteran of many United Nations operations in the Middle East, was chosen Wednesday as the organization’s top envoy to Iraq, replacing Ashraf Qazi, who was assigned Tuesday to lead United Nations operations in southern Sudan.

Mr. de Mistura served under Mr. Qazi in 2005 and 2006 as the deputy United Nations representative in Iraq. Before that he spent four years in southern Lebanon as a personal representative of Kofi Annan, then the secretary general.

Mr. de Mistura, who is of Italian and Swedish descent, is now director of the United Nations Staff College in Turin, Italy.

Mudhafer al-Husaini contributed reporting for this article, and an Iraqi employee for The New York Times in Najaf.

    After Talks With Bush, Maliki Visits Top Shiite Cleric to Discuss Plans, NYT, 6.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/world/middleeast/06iraq.html

U.S. General: Next Few Months Crucial

September 5, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:34 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- The No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq said Tuesday that the next three to four months will be crucial in determining whether the United States can start to withdraw troops from Iraq without sacrificing security gains since the troop buildup began early this year.

Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno said the number of attacks in August fell to their lowest level in more than a year, although he gave no figures. Odierno insisted that overall violence was declining -- a sign that the buildup ordered by President Bush was working.

''I think the next three to four months are critical,'' Odierno told reporters. ''I think that if we can continue to do what we are doing, we'll get to such a level where we think we can do it with less troops.''

Bush himself raised the possibility of a reduction in the 160,000-strong U.S. force during his surprise visit Monday to al-Asad Air Base in Anbar province, where Sunni Arab sheiks have been turning against al-Qaida in Iraq.

Bush said U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and the top commander Gen. David Petraeus ''tell me if the kind of success we are now seeing continues, it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces.''

Crocker and Petraeus will report to Congress next week on security and political progress since Bush dispatched 30,000 extra troops to Iraq to curb sectarian warfare. Petraeus is expected to point to a dramatic decline in violence in Anbar province thanks to a grass-roots revolt against al-Qaida.

On Tuesday, an al-Qaida front group announced on an Islamist Web site that it was forming new suicide battalions to strike at the Americans and their ''renegade'' allies -- an apparent response to the burgeoning revolt against the terror movement.

''These battalions, with God's help, will perform their duties in an excellent manner during the month of Ramadan and the enemies of God will suffer a lot,'' the statement said, referring to the Islamic season of fasting that begins in about two weeks.

Odierno said U.S. forces were alert to the possibility of increased attacks during Ramadan but in the run-up to the holy month ''violence has been going down.''

The optimistic tone of recent U.S. statements appears aimed at persuading moderate Republicans in Congress to stand by the president and resist Democratic calls to begin bringing the troops home as soon as possible.

U.S. officials acknowledge privately they have not turned the corner in restoring security, even as they insist that trends are favorable. Last month, civilian deaths across Iraq rose to at least 1,809, the second highest monthly total this year, according to figures compiled by The Associated Press.

Early Wednesday, a roadside bomb exploded on the fringes of the capital's Shiite slum of Sadr City, killing nine and injuring 21, police said. The bomb went off in the crowded al-Hamza square shortly before 8 a.m. in an area where minibuses were stopped to pick up people heading to work, a police officer said on condition of anonymity.

At least 42 people were killed or found dead across the country Tuesday, according to police reports.

The Electricity Ministry announced Tuesday that eight of its engineers and technicians were kidnapped and murdered the day before by unknown gunmen in east Baghdad.

The eight were traveling to a training session out of town when they were abducted. Relatives identified their bullet-riddled bodies in a hospital, ministry spokesman Aziz al-Shamari said.

In Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, gunmen ambushed a car in the city center Tuesday, killing three men and a woman, police Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim al-Jubouri said.

Despite some improvements in security, Iraqi politicians have made little progress in reaching power-sharing agreements among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds -- considered essential to lasting peace.

Iraq's parliament reconvened Tuesday after a much-criticized monthlong summer break. Lawmakers refused to give up their holiday despite outrage in the United States, where American officials and commentators complained that Iraqis were vacationing while American troops were dying.

Parliament in July shrugged off calls from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to cancel the summer break, saying there was no point waiting any longer for the Cabinet to deliver draft legislation.

Deputy speaker Khaled al-Attiyah told the AP that the assembly had not yet received promised draft legislation to ease the ban on former Saddam Hussein supporters holding government jobs -- a key demand of Sunni Arabs.

He also said he did not expect parliament to begin debating a draft bill on sharing the nation's oil revenue before mid-September.

Both bills are among the 18 benchmarks which the United States set down to measure political progress.

Also Tuesday, an appeals court upheld death sentences imposed against ''Chemical Ali'' al-Majid and two other Saddam lieutenants convicted of crimes against humanity for their roles a massacre of Kurds in the late 1980s.

Under Iraqi law they must now be hanged within the next 30 days.

In addition to al-Majid, the Iraqi High Tribunal upheld death sentences of former defense minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai and Hussein Rashid Mohammed, a former deputy director of operations for the Iraqi armed forces.

Al-Tai negotiated the cease-fire than ended the 1991 Gulf War, when a U.S.-led coalition drove Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

    U.S. General: Next Few Months Crucial, NYT, 5.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html

News Analysis

Bush Shifts Terms for Measuring Progress in Iraq

September 5, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 — With the Democratic-led Congress poised to measure progress in Iraq by focusing on the central government’s failure to perform, President Bush is proposing a new gauge, by focusing on new American alliances with the tribes and local groups that Washington once feared would tear the country apart.

That shift in emphasis was implicit in Mr. Bush’s decision to bypass Baghdad on his eight-hour trip to Iraq, stopping instead in Anbar Province, once the heart of an anti-American Sunni insurgency. By meeting with tribal leaders who just a year ago were considered the enemy, and who now are fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a president who has unveiled four or five strategies for winning over Iraqis — depending on how one counts — may now be on the cusp of yet another.

It is not clear whether the Democrats who control Congress will be in any mood to accept the changing measures. On Tuesday, there were contentious hearings over a Government Accountability Office report that, like last month’s National Intelligence Estimate, painted a bleak picture of Iraq’s future.

It was the White House and the Iraqi government, not Congress, that first proposed the benchmarks for Iraq that are now producing failing grades, a provenance that raises questions about why the administration is declaring now that the government’s performance is not the best measure of change.

The White House insists that Mr. Bush’s fresh embrace of Sunni leaders simply augments his consistent support of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

But some of Mr. Bush’s critics regard the change as something far more significant, saying they believe it amounts to a grudging acknowledgment by the White House of something these critics themselves have long asserted — that Iraq will never become the kind of cohesive, unified state that could be a democratic beacon for the Middle East.

“They have come around to the inevitable,” said Peter W. Galbraith, a former American diplomat whose 2006 book, “The End of Iraq,” argued that Mr. Bush was trying to rebuild a nation that never really existed, because Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds had never adopted a common Iraqi identity. “He has finally recognized that fact, and is now trying to work with it,” Mr. Galbraith said Tuesday.

Still, like the other strategies Mr. Bush has embraced, this one is fraught with risks.

There is no assurance that the willingness of Sunnis in Anbar to join in common cause with the United States against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia can be replicated elsewhere in Iraq. And as reporters who have been embedded with units working to enlist the support of the Sunni sheiks have written, in vivid accounts from the scene, there are many reasons to question how sustained the Sunnis’ loyalty will be.

The sheiks and their followers have been barred from the Iraqi military, and it is unclear whether Mr. Maliki’s government will let large numbers of Sunnis sign up in the future. That creates the risk that the Sunni groups, once better trained and better armed, will ultimately turn on the central government or its patron, the American military.

Then there is the worry that, even if Mr. Bush is successful in working in promoting “moderate” Sunnis in Anbar and “moderate” Shiites in the south, the result will be exactly the kind of partitioned state — with all its potential for full-scale civil war — that the White House has long insisted must be avoided.

“Those are real risks, and they explain in part why the strategy was not pursued before late in 2006,” said Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University professor who, as a member of the National Security Council staff at the White House until he left this summer, was one of the architects of the “New Way Forward,” the plan Mr. Bush unveiled in January.

“But the first principle we embraced in the new strategy is that Iraq is a mosaic,” Mr. Feaver said, “and that the risks of approaching it that way were deemed worth taking, given the alternative.”

The White House insists that by flying into the tribal areas, Mr. Bush is not undercutting Mr. Maliki or cutting him loose. Instead, White House officials say that ever since his January speech, Mr. Bush has been pursuing a dual strategy, pressing for “top down” change from Baghdad as well as “bottom up” change from the provinces.

The current focus on the provinces, they say, reflects the fact that the White House overestimated what could be achieved by Mr. Maliki and his government, and underestimated the degree to which the local tribes developed a deep hatred for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is led by foreigners. The extent of its links to Osama bin Laden’s network is not clear.

“It’s not that they love us Americans,” said one senior administration official. “It’s that Al Qaeda was so heavy-handed, taking out Sunnis just because they were smoking a cigarette. In the end, that may be the best break we’ve gotten in a while.”

As he flew from Iraq to Australia on Monday, Mr. Bush cast the Sunni leaders he had met in the deserts of Anbar in the most positive light possible.

“They were profuse in their praise for America,” he told reporters on Air Force One, according to a pool report. He said they “had made the decision that they don’t want to live under Al Qaeda,” adding that “they got sick of them.”

Mr. Bush, of course, has had similar public praise for just about every Iraqi leader he has met, even a few leaders now disparaged by White House officials as unreliable, powerless or two-faced.

Mr. Bush himself has told associates that in the end, the Iraq experiment depends on whether Mr. Maliki and his aides are truly willing to share power, or whether they are determined to keep the Sunnis down.

For now, however, the White House is arguing that the ground-up relationships they are building in places like Anbar are more important than keeping a scorecard of legislation passed or stalled in Baghdad. Whether that argument is enough to keep a few wavering Republicans on board may determine whether Mr. Bush gets a bit more time to try his latest strategy.

    Bush Shifts Terms for Measuring Progress in Iraq, NYT, 5.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/world/middleeast/05assess.html?hp

Bush, in Iraq, Says Troop Reduction Is Possible

September 4, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD and STEVEN LEE MYERS

AL ASAD AIR BASE, Iraq, Sept. 3 — President Bush made a surprise eight-hour visit to Iraq on Monday, emphasizing security gains, sectarian reconciliation and the possibility of a troop withdrawal, thus embracing and pre-empting this month’s crucial Congressional hearings on his Iraq strategy.

His visit, with his commanders and senior Iraqi officials, had a clear political goal: to try to head off opponents’ pressure for a withdrawal by hailing what he called recent successes in Iraq and by contending that only making Iraq stable would allow American forces to pull back.

Mr. Bush’s visit to Iraq — his third — was spent at this remote desert base in the restive Sunni province of Anbar, where he had summoned Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and others to demonstrate that reconciliation among Iraq’s warring sectarian factions was at least conceivable, if not yet a fact.

After talks with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, and Ryan C. Crocker, the ambassador to Iraq, Mr. Bush said that they “tell me that if the kind of success we are now seeing here continues it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces.”

Mr. Bush did not say how large a troop withdrawal was possible. Nor did he say whether he envisioned any forces being withdrawn sooner than next spring, when the first of the additional 30,000 troops Mr. Bush sent to Iraq this year are scheduled to come home anyway.

Still, his remarks were the clearest indication yet that a reduction would begin sometime in the months ahead, answering the growing opposition in Washington to an unpopular war while at the same time trying to argue that any change in strategy was not a failure.

“Those decisions will be based on a calm assessment by our military commanders on the conditions on the ground — not a nervous reaction by Washington politicians to poll results in the media,” Mr. Bush told a gathering of American troops, who responded with a rousing cheer. “In other words, when we begin to draw down troops from Iraq, it will be from a position of strength and success, not from a position of fear and failure. To do otherwise would embolden our enemies and make it more likely that they would attack us at home.”

To ensure security, the White House shrouded Mr. Bush’s visit in secrecy, issuing a misleading schedule that said he would leave the White House on Monday and Air Force One would refuel in Hawaii. Instead, the president left the White House on Sunday night, traveled to Andrews Air Force Base without the usual motorcade and after an overnight flight arrived in Iraq on a sweltering summer afternoon when temperatures reached 110 degrees.

Mr. Bush flew with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and his national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, an extraordinary gathering of top leaders in a war zone. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, flew to Iraq separately and joined them.

The Anbar region is a Sunni stronghold where in recent months there have been significant improvements in security. Administration officials have been touting the gains as evidence that the increase in American troops has proved a success — a word Mr. Bush used eight times in his public remarks on Monday.

Mr. Hadley, briefing reporters, recalled a military intelligence officer’s dire warning a year ago that Al Qaeda controlled the provincial capital, Ramadi, and other towns in the region. “Anbar Province is lost,” he quoted the analyst as saying then. Mr. Hadley was apparently referring to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign led. The extent of its links to Osama bin Laden’s network is not clear.

On Monday, after meeting with some of the local Sunni leaders who only months ago led the struggle against the American presence in the region, Mr. Bush held up Anbar as a model of the progress that was possible.

“When you stand on the ground here in Anbar and hear from the people who live here, you can see what the future of Iraq can look like,” he said, night having fallen at the base.

During his visit, Mr. Bush did not leave the base, a heavily fortified home to about 10,000 American troops about 120 miles west of Baghdad. Mr. Hadley said planning for the trip had started five or six weeks ago.

Administration officials rejected the notion that the trip was a publicity stunt. They said Mr. Bush wanted to meet face-to-face with General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker, who are to testify before Congress about progress in Iraq next week, and with Iraqi leaders he has been pressing from afar to take steps toward political reconciliation.

By summoning Mr. Maliki and other top officials to the Sunni heartland, a region the Shiite prime minister has rarely visited, Mr. Bush succeeded in forcing a public display of unity. Meeting with the Iraqi leaders in a buff-colored one-story building near the runway, Mr. Bush effusively greeted President Jalal Talabani, the last of the five officials to enter the small conference room. “Mr. President, Mr. President, the president of the whole Iraq,” Mr. Bush said, kissing Mr. Talabani three times on the cheeks.

The other Iraqi officials there were Vice President Adel Abdul-Mehdi, Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih and Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan region.

“The government they represent, of course, is based in Baghdad,” Mr. Bush said, appearing with Ms. Rice and Mr. Gates in front of two parked Humvees at the base, “but they’re here because they know the success of a free Iraq depends on the national government’s support from the bottom up.”

Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, who was visiting neighboring Iran when Mr. Bush and the other top administration officials arrived, was conspicuously absent. Mr. Zebari, a Kurd, said he had been aware that high-level visitors from the United States were coming but that his trip to Iran had been planned long in advance and that the timing was strictly a coincidence.

In Washington, a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, said the president’s visit and his assertions about progress would do little to persuade skeptics. “Despite this massive P.R. operation, the American people are still demanding a new strategy,” the spokesman, Jim Manley, said in a telephone interview.

Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the reversal in Anbar had less do with American strategy than with local frustration over the extremism of Al Qaeda fighters trying to impose their doctrine. Mr. Cordesman suggested it was more of an anomaly than a model that could be applied elsewhere in Iraq, where sectarian divisions and strife appear to be worsening.

“We are spinning events that don’t really reflect the reality on the ground,” he said.

While some administration officials have recently described the Sunni shift in Anbar as serendipitous, they portrayed the improvements as an outgrowth, at least in part, of the decision to send nearly 4,000 additional marines to the province as part of the White House strategy to increase troops. “This is not serendipity,” Mr. Hadley told reporters.

Distrust remains deep between Sunnis in Anbar and the Maliki government — and it is clear that Mr. Maliki sees effort by the American military to organize armed groups of Sunnis to assist American troops as a policy that amounts to assisting his enemies. Nor is it clear that the same model can be made to work in areas of Iraq where Sunnis and Shiites live together.

Sunnis, for their part, complain that the Maliki government has long failed to deliver services and to share oil revenue with Anbar. Describing the meeting Monday between the tribal sheiks and Iraqi officials from Baghdad, Mr. Gates said, “There was a sense of shared purpose among them and some good-natured jousting over resources.”

It remained unclear whether Mr. Bush planned to announce any specific troop withdrawals when he delivers the congressionally mandated report later this month.

Several administration officials say Mr. Bush and his commanders and military advisers have neared a consensus on beginning a reduction in American forces. Speaking to reporters traveling with him, Mr. Gates said Monday that he had formulated his opinion, though he declined to disclose it.

Asked about Mr. Bush’s comments on possible troop reductions, Mr. Gates added, “Clearly that is one of the central issues that everyone has been examining — what is the security situation, what do we expect the security situation to be in the months ahead?” He went on to say, “What opportunities does that provide in terms of maintaining the security situation while perhaps beginning to bring the troop level down?”

As he did in Washington late last week, Mr. Bush urged lawmakers to withhold judgment on the situation in Iraq until hearing first-hand reports next week from General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker. At the same time, though, he has used the White House’s considerable platform to assert his own views.

“The strategy we put into place earlier this year was designed to help the Iraqis improve their security so that political and economic progress could follow,” Mr. Bush said after meeting with Mr. Maliki and the other Iraqi leaders. “And that is exactly the effect it is having in places like Anbar.”

Maliki Claims Political Progress


BAGHDAD, Sept. 3 — Earlier on Monday, at a news conference here, Mr. Maliki made his own effort to underscore political progress his government had achieved in recent weeks. He said that a long-discussed law allowing former members of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein to return to jobs in government had been submitted to Parliament.

“This law has been approved by the political leaders, and by the national political council,” Mr. Maliki said. “It is now before the parliament to discuss it and approve it.”

Agreement on the law, part of a package of requirements pressed by the Bush administration, would be an important milestone.

“We believe that this law represents the minimum accepted level of our ambitions,” said Salman al-Jumaili, a lawmaker from the main Sunni coalition.

An earlier agreement on a law broke down after Shiite leaders in southern Iraq voiced opposition.

James Glanz contributed reporting from Cairo. David S. Cloud reported from Al Asad Air Base and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.

    Bush, in Iraq, Says Troop Reduction Is Possible, NYT, 4.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/world/middleeast/04iraq.html?hp

Bush and Top Aides Visit Iraq Days Ahead of Assessment

September 3, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

AL ASAD AIR BASE, Iraq, Sept. 3 — President Bush and his top national security advisers made a surprise joint visit to Iraq today for talks with Gen. David H. Petraeus and top Iraqi officials a week before the American commander is scheduled to deliver a long-awaited assessment of the situation in Iraq.

Administration officials said Mr. Bush decided to travel to Iraq along with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to meet face-to-face with General Petraeus and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki because it was his last chance to do so before completing a review of his Iraq strategy.

“He has assembled essentially his war cabinet here, and they are all convening with the Iraqi leadership to discuss the way forward,” the Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said. “This will be the last big gathering of the president before the president makes a decision on the way forward,” he added, noting that Mr. Bush would l leave here for a trip to Australia to meet with leaders of Asian and Pacific nations.

It was the first time Mr. Bush was in Iraq with his top advisers, and his third trip to the country.

Ms. Rice and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made a joint visit to Baghdad last year, shortly after Mr. Maliki took office.

Mr. Bush held talks today with his commanders and then he and the American delegation met with Iraqi officials including Mr. Maliki and President Jalal Talabani. The group sat across a narrow conference table facing one another.

Mr. Talabani had been delayed getting to the meeting, but when he arrived, Mr. Bush greeted him warmly, according to Mr. Morrell.

“Mr. President. Mr. President. The president of the whole country,” Mr. Bush said to Mr. Talabani, before shaking his hand and sharing a traditional Middle Eastern greeting.

Mr. Bush’s one-day stop at this desert air base in Anbar Province underscored the administration’s intention as part of the strategy review to bolster support for the Sunni Arab region, where former insurgents are increasingly cooperating with American forces.

But the dramatic meeting also had a clear political goal — to shift the focus this week away from Congress, where a series of hearings on reports critical of the progress of the administration strategy are planned, and to buttress White House assertions that its efforts in Iraq are beginning to produce results.

Administration officials rejected the idea that the trip was a publicity stunt ahead of the reports.

“There are some people who might try to derive this trip as a photo opportunity,” the White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said. “We wholeheartedly disagree.”

“This is an opportunity for the president to meet with his commander on the ground and his ambassador on the ground while they are in fact all on the ground together,” Ms. Perino said. “It’s also a chance for him to meet with Prime Minister Maliki and other national government leaders. And he will be able to look Prime Minister Maliki in the eye and talk with him about the progress that is starting to happen in Iraq, what we hope to see and the challenges that remain.”

After meeting with top military advisers last week in Washington, Mr. Bush approved an acceleration of a new program to intensify assistance directly to Sunni areas of Iraq, officials have said. Mr. Gates’s trip seemed aimed at least in part in explaining the American concept for stepped-up assistance to officials in Iraq’s government, who have raised strong concerns about the idea of assisting their Sunni rivals, before it is announced publicly.

General Petraeus is widely expected to ask that additional troops sent to Iraq earlier this year be kept in place at least until next spring, a course Mr. Bush appears to support. But a senior Defense Department official said the gathering would be “instrumental” in formulating recommendations to Mr. Bush on possible adjustments to the plan. The move to increase aid to Sunni groups is one example of the adjustments that are coming out of the strategy review, and the move reflects frustration that Mr. Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government has not taken advantage of improvements in security to move forward on reconciliation with Sunni rivals.

But the administration has seized on the Sunni tribes’ sudden willingness to cooperate in fighting the homegrown extremist group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as a promising political development that they hope will convince members of Congress, especially Republicans who have been calling for withdrawals from Iraq, that political progress is happening, albeit from the ground up, not from the top down, as the administration strategy initially envisioned.

While backing Sunni groups is an attempt to circumvent Mr. Maliki, Bush administration officials stress that the goal is not to undermine his government but to broaden its support.

Mr. Maliki has been deeply worried that outreach to Sunni tribes, which has included American support for setting up armed neighborhood watch groups in Anbar and other Sunni areas, amounted to backing his enemies.

But the senior Defense Department official said the American aid to the Sunni tribes comes with “a quid pro quo” — the need to recognize the legitimacy of the Mr. Maliki’s government in Baghdad.

The official added that spending in Anbar province by military commanders would be increased.

Mr. Bush and his cabinet members were also scheduled to meet today with Sunni tribe leaders from Anbar, many of whom until recently opposed the American presence. Mr. Maliki and other top Iraqi officials had scheduled a rare trip into the Sunni heartland for the talks with the American delegation but it was unclear if Mr. Maliki intended to hold talks with the Sunnis during his visit.

Mr. Bush and Gates planned to press the two sides to move forward on reconciliation and to discuss such steps as provincial elections that are aimed at drawing the former Sunni insurgents into a closer relationship with Mr. Maliki, the senior Defense Department official traveling with Mr. Gates said.

“One of the great concerns many have is that it not be a temporary marriage of convenience,” he said, referring to the growing American relationship with Sunni tribes. The goal, he added, was to ensure that “Sunnis in Anbar are drawing closer to the central government.”

Aides said that Mr. Bush and Mr. Gates also wanted to speak face-to-face with General Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, as he considers recommendations for adjusting strategy in Iraq.

The high-level visit was conducted with extraordinary security precautions. American officials said the measures, which included withholding disclosure of Mr. Gates’s arrival after Mr. Bush was on the ground, were necessary because of the top officials from Iraq and from the United States who were present. Although Mr. Gates arrived on a C-17 transport plane, Mr. Bush traveled on Air Force One, which could be seen sitting on the air base’s baking tarmac.

There had been intense speculation among the White House press corps that the president would make such a trip either on his way to or back from Australia, and the White House went to great lengths to keep the secret. The president slipped out of a side entrance at the White House on Sunday evening. Instead of taking Marine One, the presidential helicopter, he was driven to Andrews Air Force base with just one car accompanying him, as opposed to the two dozen or so vehicles that ordinarily make up a presidential motorcade.

Mr. Bush typically takes a small, rotating, pool of reporters with him aboard Air Force One. The members of the pool assigned to travel aboard the president’s plane to Sydney were summoned to the White House over the weekend for face-to-face meetings with Mr. Bush’s top press aides.

They were told to show up at Andrews Sunday between 6p.m. and 6:30p.m., not this morning, as had been publicly announced. Reporters were permitted to inform their spouses and just one editor, who could tell no one else, and were asked not to pass the information by cellphone. When they boarded Air Force One inside a hangar, not on the tarmac, as is typical, the shades were drawn and Secret Service agents took their pager devices and cellphones until shortly before the plane landed in Iraq.

The president is expected to spend about six hours on the ground in Iraq before leaving for Australia.

Though Mr. Bush and General Petraeus had met as recently as last week by video hookup, the seemingly last-minute nature of the trip and the array of top officials from both governments who attended did not mean there were deep disagreements among President Bush’s top advisers about strategy in Iraq, they said.

“Nothing beats the opportunity to look Dave Petraeus in the eye and Ambassador Crocker and say, ‘What do you think? What do we need to do?’” said a senior Defense official traveling with Mr. Gates.

Mr. Bush has been touting developments in Anbar recently and wanted to meet with Sunni sheiks who have formed alliances with the United States this year. Some of the tribal leaders he is expected to meet with were likely involved in operations against American forces before switching their allegiances.

“You don’t reconcile with your friends; you reconcile with your enemies,” Mr. Morrell said, explaining the decision to met with the tribal leaders.

The meetings were held at Al Asad air base rather than in Baghdad because Mr. Bush wanted to see first hand the progress in Anbar, he said, although the president is not scheduled to leave the base, a sprawling complex far from the province’s population centers.

The air base, the second largest in Iraq, is a parched, sunny, dusty place. Troops here said temperatures today were about average for this time of year—about 115 degrees.

After his tarmac greeting, Mr. Bush, wearing a dark blue short-sleeved shirt and slacks, posed for pictures before being taken by motorcade to a building where a marine gave him a short briefing.

Mr. Bush leaned slightly forward, both hands on a makeshift table, and listened to the marine, with a pointer in hand, as he gave an overview.

The marine said there was progress being made with Iraqi security forces in Anbar, handling more urban duties, allowing the Marines to hunt for insurgents, according to a pool report. But he also said that there is a problem with the short home leaves — five months — which he said strains training, not to mention family life.

“Morale? How is morale?” Mr. Bush was overhead asking.

“Very high, sir,” the marine responded.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting from Washington, and Christine Hauser from New York.

    Bush and Top Aides Visit Iraq Days Ahead of Assessment, NYT, 3.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/03/world/middleeast/03cnd-prexy.html?hp

Civilian Death Toll Falls in Baghdad but Rises Across Iraq

September 2, 2007
The New York Times
By JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD, Sept. 1 — Newly released statistics for Iraqi civilian deaths in August reflect the strikingly mixed security picture that has emerged from a gradual six-month increase in American troop strength here: the number of deaths across the country rose by about 20 percent since July, but in the capital itself, the number dropped sharply.

The figures, provided by Iraqi Interior Ministry officials on Saturday, mirrored the geographic pattern of the troop increase, which is focused on Baghdad. The national rise in mortality is partly a result of the enormous death toll, more than 500, in a truck bomb attack that struck a Yazidi community in August north of the capital, outside the areas directly affected by the additional troops.

As Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander of military forces here, prepare to brief Congress on the progress of the troop increase, Iraqi politicians, clearly recognizing what is at stake, view the new figures through the lens of how their parties hope that Congress will assess the situation in Iraq.

“We were hoping the figures would go down, but what happened was expected,” said Haidar al-Ebadi, who sits in Parliament as a senior member of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s Dawa Party. The troop increase made it harder for insurgent groups to operate in Baghdad, he said, so they pushed outward to easier targets.

“I believe that we should not read these numbers as an assessment of the security plan,” Mr. Ebadi said. “The security plan was a success so far.”

Other Iraqis see the rising violence in the countryside in August as proof that the overall American plan in Iraq is failing. Saleh al-Mutlak, who leads the National Dialogue Front, a hard-line Sunni group, said the American and Iraqi security plan had failed to achieve its goals, opening the door to more attacks.

“I think the reason is the loss of confidence in the security plan and the political process, which drove people to become desperate and resort to violence,” he said.

American and Iraqi government officials here are extremely reluctant to provide regular, comprehensive figures for civilian deaths, making it difficult to compile accurate data. But figures provided to The New York Times by an Interior Ministry official who asked to remain anonymous indicated that 2,318 civilians died violently in the country in August, compared with 1,980 in July.

Statistics compiled from Iraqi government sources by Reuters and The Associated Press also showed significant increases, although the precise figures varied.

But the figures provided by the Interior Ministry official show a drop in deaths within Baghdad, to 656 in August from 896 in July.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a spokesman for the American-led multinational forces here, said the troop increase had been intended to give Iraqi political parties a chance to settle some of their differences.

“The surge of operations was focused on improving security in Baghdad, and we have seen some progress — not as much as we want,” Colonel Garver said. “It’s a neighborhood-by-neighborhood thing. But it’s progress.”

Colonel Garver acknowledged that as a result of the operations in Baghdad, militias and insurgent groups had been trying to establish networks north of the capital. “You see attacks up north in part because it’s harder to move around Baghdad if you’re a terrorist,” he said. “It’s harder to bring car bombs in.”

Even as the mortality figures suggested improvements in security within Baghdad, fresh signs emerged of turmoil within the Baghdad police force, which will ultimately be called upon to sustain any gains.

American soldiers and Iraqi national police officers have disbanded the force at a local police station in Khadra, a Sunni-dominated neighborhood in western Baghdad, the United States military said in a statement on Saturday. The officers at the station failed to stop criminal and insurgent activity in the area, and roadside bombs were often found less than 100 yards from police checkpoints, the military said.

The role of the national police force in the local cleanup was jarring, given its own reputation for disloyalty and inefficiency. American officials said Thursday that an independent commission created by Congress would recommend overhauling the national police to purge it of Shiite militia members and corrupt officers.

Maj. Andy Yerkes, who leads an American team advising the national police in Baghdad, said many of the Shiite-dominated force simply act as “turnstiles” if death squads for the Mahdi Army arrive at their checkpoints: standing aside and letting their fellow Shiites through to do their work in Sunni areas.

“I get frustrated because there are really good men out there who don’t want to be turnstiles,” he added. “But at the same time, if they stop something, they don’t want their father or mother to be killed.”

Reporting was contributed by Damien Cave, Stephen Farrell, Ali Adeeb and Ahmad Fadam.

    Civilian Death Toll Falls in Baghdad but Rises Across Iraq, NYT, 2.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/world/middleeast/02iraq.html?hp

The World

This War Is Not Like the Others — or Is It?

August 26, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

AS the nations of Europe leapt to arms in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson’s mind turned to President James Madison and the war with England in 1812.

“Madison and I are the only two Princeton men who have become president,” Wilson observed ominously in a letter, noting that tensions with Great Britain over its naval blockage of Germany recalled earlier disputes with England about freedom of the seas. “The circumstances of the War of 1812 and now run parallel. I sincerely hope they will not go further.”

His fears were unfounded. Great Britain became an ally in World War I, Wilson’s alma mater notwithstanding. But his knack for reading — or misreading — historical parallels hardly stands out in the annals of American presidents and public officials.

President Bush sent historians scurrying toward their keyboards last week when he defended the United States occupation of Iraq by arguing that the pullout from Vietnam had led to the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge in neighboring Cambodia. His speech was rhetorical jujitsu, an attempt to throw back at his critics their favorite historical analogy — Vietnam — for the Iraq war. His argument aroused considerable skepticism from historians and political scientists, who note that the United States’ military action in Vietnam was among the factors that destabilized Cambodia. But Mr. Bush’s statement also revived a perennial question. Whenever a public officials starts to say “the lesson of,” is that a cue to stop listening?

“It is great for sound bites but it is completely misleading,” said Jeffrey Record, a professor of strategy at the United States Air Force’s Air War College in Montgomery, Ala. He wrote a nine-point rebuttal to the analogies in Mr. Bush’s speech. “Reasoning by historical analogy is inherently dangerous,” Professor Record said. “It is especially dangerous in the hands of policymakers whose command of history is weak and who are pushing specific policy agendas.”

The Central Intelligence Agency has worried enough about the pitfalls of drawing historical analogies that two decades ago it spent $400,000 commissioning a course in the subject for senior analysts from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. The Kennedy School ran the program until 2001, when the agency itself took it over.

Its creators told students their aims were akin to those of “a junior high school sex-education class”: preparing decision makers for an activity more inevitable than recommended.

“Since they are bound to do what we talk about, later if not sooner, they ought to profit from a bit of forethought about ways and means,” Professors Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May wrote in “Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers,” a book tied to the course.

“A little knowledge,” they wrote, “holds out the prospect of enhancing not alone safety but also enjoyment.”

Professors Neustadt and May advised policymakers considering past precedents to make lists of similarities, differences and unknowns. As a model, they examined the Cuban missile crisis.

Some in the Kennedy administration argued for bombing Cuba to prevent the Soviets from keeping missiles there. Anything less forceful, the hawks argued, would replicate Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 appeasement of Hitler at Munich — the analogy that proponents of military force have always used since World War II, including around the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

President Kennedy, however, was unconvinced by the Munich comparison. He argued that bombing Cuba risked the appearance of “a Pearl Harbor in reverse,” with the United States in the bomber’s role, and his views laid the groundwork for the successful naval blockade.

Such happy outcomes, though, are the exception, Professors Neustadt and May conclude.

They note that Johnson administration officials could have considered Thucydides’ account of the ill-conceived Athenian invasion of Syracuse more than two millennia ago. “Surely they had read ‘The Peloponnesian War’ somewhere, sometime, at least in snippets,” the authors wrote.

But no one in the Johnson administration appears to have brought up its parallels to the Vietnam War.

Public officials, political scientists say, usually turn to history to justify policies they’ve already settled on. In the 1980s, for example, Reagan administration officials compared tolerating the Sandinistas to appeasement at Munich, while opponents called Nicaragua another Vietnam.

“People alight on the likeness with an event in the past, and it helps them to understand something when they can associate it with something familiar,” Professor May said in an interview.

Historical analogies in public statements are especially suspect. Talking about Vietnam during the run-up to the war there, for example, United States government officials most often invoked Korea or — with increasing frequency as the escalation began — the appeasement of Hitler, according to a tally by Yuen Foong Khong, a professor of international relations at Oxford. The French retreat from Vietnam in 1954 — a precedent that augured failure — was almost never mentioned.

In private, however, the French defeat came up much more often — far more often than Munich and nearly as often as Korea, Professor Khong concluded in his 1992 book, “Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965.”

Policymakers also sometimes bat away facts that mar their analogies. Before the Vietnam War, for example, Under Secretary of State George W. Ball repeatedly reminded President Lyndon Johnson and his other aides of Vietnam’s overriding differences from both Munich and Korea. Arguing that Vietnam was “sui generis,” Ball predicted that the United States would suffer the same fate as the French in 1954.

Johnson listened, but he and his advisers dismissed Ball’s case nonetheless. France, generals told Ball, had not won a war since Napoleon.

Finally, Ball, recognizing that argument would never settle the battle of analogies, proposed what he called “a trial period” of “controlled commitment.” In a June 18, 1965, internal memo, Ball proposed increasing the number of American troops in Vietnam to 100,000 for three months to “appraise the costs and possibilities of waging a successful land war in South Vietnam and chart a clear course of action.” The results, he argued, would show which comparison was more apt: the Americans in Korea or the French in Vietnam.

Now, Professor Khong said in an interview, Ball’s proposal may itself be a good analogy for the current situation in Iraq, where President Bush has increased troop levels in a test of the military’s ability to pacify the country.

Next comes a debate over the meaning of the test results, Professor Khong said, which may be why both sides are reaching furiously for analogies to support their positions.

    This War Is Not Like the Others — or Is It?, NYT, 26.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/weekinreview/26kirkpatrick.html?hp

Family Loses 2nd Son; 3rd Brother Serves

August 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:57 p.m. ET
The New York Times

CLOVIS, Calif. (AP) -- Early in the Iraq war, Jeff and Peggy Hubbard faced the news that every parent with a child at war dreads, the death of their son Jared, a Marine killed alongside his best friend.

Two years, nine months and 18 days later, they faced another grim-faced officer. This time, it was their youngest, Army Cpl. Nathan Hubbard, 21, dead in a helicopter crash in Iraq.

A third brother, Jason, was on another helicopter in the same unit and was at the crash site. He accompanied his brother's body on a flight out of Iraq and was on his way home for the funeral.

The family has been told that, if he requests it, Jason Hubbard will be discharged or given a noncombat assignment under an Army policy governing sole surviving siblings and children of soldiers killed in combat, said Tim Rolen, a family friend and pastor who co-presided at Jared Hubbard's funeral on Veteran's Day 2004.

''In all of our minds we have an order of the way things go. The death of a child is out of order. You now have a family that has lost two,'' Rolen said. ''One doesn't prepare you for another one.''

Nathan was barely out of high school when a roadside bomb killed Jared and Jared's best friend. Nathan tattooed his brother's initials on his arm, described him as his hero and enlisted to pick up where his big brother left off.

With a yearlong tour of duty almost behind him, he was making plans to meet his buddies in Hawaii, where he was stationed, when the Black Hawk helicopter carrying him and 13 other soldiers had mechanical problems and crashed during a night flight. There were no survivors.

Jason Hubbard, 33, had resigned as a Fresno County sheriff's deputy to join the Army at the same time Nathan did. At their request, the two were assigned to the same unit, the 3rd Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division based on Oahu.

Jason was riding in another helicopter when the Black Hawk went down. He told his wife by telephone that he was part of the crew assigned to search the wreckage, according to Rolen.

He accompanied Nathan's body on a military aircraft from Iraq to Kuwait, then on to California.

Flags were lowered to half-staff outside homes, stores and municipal buildings Friday all over Clovis, a city of 90,000 next to Fresno.

For many people in the town, the Hubbard family's tragedy elicited echoes from two movies: ''Saving Private Ryan,'' which depicted the search for a paratrooper whose three brothers have already died in World War II, and ''Legends of the Fall'' -- one of Nathan Hubbard's favorite films -- about the death of the youngest of three Montana brothers who went off to battle during World War I.

The military does not track families with more than one child serving in Iraq or cases in which casualties have resulted in a service member's discharge or change in combat status, said Lt. Jonathan Withington, a Department of Defense spokesman.

Buchanan High Principal Don Ulrich remembered Nathan Hubbard, a 2004 graduate, as a happy-go-lucky student and junior varsity wrestler who made friends easily. Counselors sent to the school Thursday were mostly visited by teachers and staff members who remembered the deaths of 2001 graduates Jared Hubbard and his friend, Jeremiah Baro.

''It is very difficult to comprehend the loss this Buchanan family has endured. All we can do is support Nathan and his brothers' commitment to serving their country and keep the family in our prayers,'' Ulrich said.

The Hubbards -- who also have a daughter, Heidi, 31 -- asked for privacy. Jeff Hubbard is a retired Clovis police officer, and a uniformed officer was posted outside their door. Capt. Drew Berrington, a longtime friend whose son grew up with Jared Hubbard, said the family's double tragedy had unsettled the most hardened veterans.

''It's difficult for us, even though we are people who deal with disturbing situations on a daily basis. It gets under our armor, even though we deal with death all the time,'' Berrington said.

Rolen said Jeff and Peggy Hubbard had conflicting emotions when Nathan and Jason enlisted six months after their brother's death. The parents were proud, but wanted to make sure the sons were doing it for the right reasons and understood the risks, he said.

''Any parent who has lost a child in this manner would say, 'Be sure.' This is a family that is strong on commitment,'' he said.

In an interview with The Fresno Bee shortly before he left for basic training in 2005, Nathan Hubbard said he knew the dangers but did not worry about dying.

''My brother -- my parents' son -- will always be in our hearts, and we'll always remember him and we'll always think of him and all that, but we've got to move on, and that's what we are doing,'' he said.

Nathan is to be buried late this coming week with full military honors at Clovis Cemetery, where his brother and friend Jeremiah Baro were buried side by side.

On Friday, at their first regular season game, members of Buchanan High School's football team plan to wear five stars on their helmets, one in honor of each graduate who has died in Iraq, school district spokeswoman Kelly Avants said.

    Family Loses 2nd Son; 3rd Brother Serves, NYT, 25.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Brothers-in-Arms.html

Toll Rises Above 500 in Iraq Bombings

August 22, 2007
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE and JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD, Aug. 21 — One week after a series of truck bombs hit a poor rural area near the Syrian border, the known casualty toll has soared to more than 500 dead and 1,500 wounded, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, making it the bloodiest coordinated attack since the American-led invasion in 2003.

Dr. Said Hakki, the director of the society, said Tuesday that local Red Crescent workers registering families for aid after the explosions near the town of Sinjar had compiled the new numbers, which dwarf the earlier estimates of at least 250 dead.

The toll, Dr. Hakki said, may yet rise. Emergency workers continued to drag body parts from the site’s dusty rubble. Among the wounded, one in five suffered serious wounds, and hospital officials reported that hundreds of families had taken their broken loved ones home, despite the threat of infection.

“We have declared the villages a disaster area,” said Khidhir Khader Rashu, the mayor of Qahtaniya, one of the villages crushed by the blasts. “What we’ve received of food supplies and other aid so far is not enough, because the scale of destruction is so huge.”

Statistical certainty can be difficult to obtain after bomb attacks, and some government officials near the villages have put the death toll closer to 360. But the Red Crescent figures align with estimates from two hospital officials in the area and with the typical ratio of dead to wounded from big bomb attacks.

With the latest figures, the attack has become the deadliest coordinated assault since the 2003 invasion by a factor of three. In July about 155 people died in a giant explosion in the northern town of Amerli.

A similar number were killed in a series of bombings and mortar attacks in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad last November, and about 152 died in Tal Afar last month from a double truck bombing.

In the area of last week’s attack, the desert villages dominated by Yazidis — a Kurdish-speaking sect whose faith combines Islamic teachings with other ancient religions — struggled to cope. Residents and officials say a constant flow of burials has filled the streets amid the stench of death arising from mounds of beige brick.

Tecken Kuli Saleem, 39, said she had stayed alive for 12 hours under the rubble, but emerged without her family.

“I was pregnant in my fourth month and lost my baby in the attack,” she said. “I can’t talk much. The criminals killed my family, and I don’t know where my children are, whether they’re dead or alive. They’re missing.”

Many families of the wounded have been so shaken by the attacks that they refused to leave their loved ones in hospitals, ferrying them back to small villages where they hoped for safety in numbers.

At the main hospital in Tal Afar, an official said only 15 wounded people remained on Tuesday. Dr. Kifah Kattu, the director general of the hospital in Sinjar, a few miles north of where the explosions occurred, said all 300 of the hospital’s wounded patients had been taken home or to smaller clinics and aid tents near family homes.

Every day, he and another hospital official said, doctors and aid workers from the villages visit the hospital to collect supplies for those who have left.

“Doctors were astonished because their relatives insisted on taking them,” Dr. Kattu said. “They thought that Sinjar was too dangerous.”

Duraid Kashmula, the governor of Mosul, said several regiments of Iraqi soldiers had been deployed to protect the area. Sand barriers have been built around three villages in greater Qahtaniya “to secure the area and prevent any strangers from entering,” he said.

He added that the explosions leveled more than 1,000 houses, most of them made of mud and stone, while another 500 were damaged.

Mr. Khader Rashu, the mayor of Qahtaniya, said little hope of finding any survivors remained. “We are facing some difficulties in removing the debris,” he said, “because there are some concrete blocks that need to be broken up.”

Iraqi officials said no suspects had been arrested. Sunni extremists, who have been warring with Kurds in the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, are believed to be responsible for the attack.

Yazidis may have been targets because of their proximity to Syria’s porous border; for their beliefs (they worship an angel whose name is sometimes translated as Satan in the Koran); or as retribution for an episode in April, when some Yazidis stoned a young Yazidi woman to death for marrying a Sunni.

For now, the Iraqi and international effort remains focused on helping the grieving, the wounded and the destitute. American troops have helped distribute water and other emergency supplies.

Dr. Hakki of the Red Crescent Society said at least three trucks full of aid had come from the Turkish government. At least nine trucks brought supplies from the Red Crescent Society, carrying basic equipment.

“We supplied tents,” Dr. Hakki said. “We supplied kitchen utensils.”

The society has also provided cash and food. He said the families of the 500 who died had received $100 for each person killed, and six months of food rations. Relatives of the wounded received $50 each and the six months’ worth of meals.

The Iraqi government, meanwhile, has distributed $1,600 payments to more than 300 families of those killed, according to local government officials.

Few residents or local leaders seemed to feel it was enough.

Yazidis from across the north, where the sect is most concentrated, said they feared that their community of several hundred thousand might not recover.

“I’ve lost 32 people from the families of my five brothers and four sisters,” said Rasheed Muhsin Khesru, 59, a Yazidi from Kirkuk.

Others said the attack would only accelerate Iraq’s already dizzying level of violence.

“In a few days, 10,000 of our men will be ready to protect our areas,” said Kheder Aziz, who was sobbing on a street in Kirkuk. “All the Sunni Arab tribes living around us are responsible, either because they helped with the attack or knew what would happen.”

Ali Fahim and Ali Adeeb contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Mosul and Kirkuk.

    Toll Rises Above 500 in Iraq Bombings, NYT, 22.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/world/middleeast/22iraq.html

The War as We Saw It

August 19, 2007
The New York Times
Op-Ed Contributors

 

By BUDDHIKA JAYAMAHA, WESLEY D. SMITH,
JEREMY ROEBUCK, OMAR MORA, EDWARD SANDMEIER,
YANCE T. GRAY and JEREMY A. MURPHY

Baghdad

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.

A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.

As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.

Similarly, Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda.

However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in constant flux.

The Iraqi government is run by the main coalition partners of the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, with Kurds as minority members. The Shiite clerical establishment formed the alliance to make sure its people did not succumb to the same mistake as in 1920: rebelling against the occupying Western force (then the British) and losing what they believed was their inherent right to rule Iraq as the majority. The qualified and reluctant welcome we received from the Shiites since the invasion has to be seen in that historical context. They saw in us something useful for the moment.

Now that moment is passing, as the Shiites have achieved what they believe is rightfully theirs. Their next task is to figure out how best to consolidate the gains, because reconciliation without consolidation risks losing it all. Washington’s insistence that the Iraqis correct the three gravest mistakes we made — de-Baathification, the dismantling of the Iraqi Army and the creation of a loose federalist system of government — places us at cross purposes with the government we have committed to support.

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.

In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, “We need security, not free food.”

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

Buddhika Jayamaha is an Army specialist. Wesley D. Smith is a sergeant. Jeremy Roebuck is a sergeant. Omar Mora is a sergeant. Edward Sandmeier is a sergeant. Yance T. Gray is a staff sergeant. Jeremy A. Murphy is a staff sergeant.

    The War as We Saw It, NYT, 19.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/opinion/19jayamaha.html?ex=1189742400&en=10c7f4155337e9ab&ei=5070

Gates Offers

Blunt Review of Progress in Iraq

August 3, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday that he was discouraged by the resignation of the Sunnis from Iraq’s cabinet and that the Bush administration might have misjudged the difficulty of achieving reconciliation between Iraq’s sectarian factions.

In one of his bluntest assessments of the progress of the administration’s Iraq strategy, Mr. Gates said, “I think the developments on the political side are somewhat discouraging at the national level.” He said that despite the Sunni withdrawal, “my hope is that it can all be patched back together.”

Mr. Gates made the remarks to reporters traveling on his plane while returning to Washington after a trip to the Middle East that included stops in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates but did not include a visit to Iraq.

Mr. Gates gave little indication whether he was leaning toward recommending a shift in the administration’s strategy next month, when officials are planning to review whether progress has been achieved by sending nearly 30,000 additional American troops to Iraq.

He acknowledged that when the Bush administration decided to send the additional troops, “We probably all underestimated the depth of the mistrust and how difficult it would be for these guys to come together on legislation, which, let’s face it, is not some kind of secondary issue.”

He was referring to the failure of Iraq’s Parliament to pass legislation distributing oil revenue, setting a timetable for provincial elections and easing employment restrictions on former Baath Party members — measures that the Bush administration considers crucial for reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites.

While critical of Iraq’s government, Mr. Gates said the security situation was “more encouraging than I would have expected three or four months ago.”

He cited progress in reducing violence in Anbar Province, formerly a center of anti-American hostility, and at persuading mostly Sunni tribal sheiks in some areas of the country to cooperate in security operations against Sunni insurgents — a development he called “in some respects unexpected.”

He said the administration would have to balance the relative lack of political progress with the somewhat encouraging security trends when it makes the September review, which will include reports from Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker.

Several American military commanders in Iraq have said that the additional troops will be needed in Iraq into next year. Some critics of the Iraq policy, including several Democrats running for president, have called for troop withdrawals and shifting to a strategy that focuses on counterterrorism, instead of on protecting Iraqis.

In justifying the need for a temporary increase in troop levels earlier this year, administration officials said more forces devoted to protecting Iraqis would give Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government “breathing room” to achieve the political reconciliation and progress on legislation.

But Mr. Gates offered a slightly different formulation on Thursday, arguing that political progress would come when Iraqi Army and police units proved able to take over primary responsibility for maintaining security in areas now largely controlled by American troops.

“I think the key is, not only establishing the security, but being able to hold on to those areas and for Iraqi Army and police to be able to provide the continuity of security over time,” he said. “It’s under that umbrella I think progress will be made at the national level.” Mr. Gates would not give a timetable.

As he has traveled around the Middle East this week, Mr. Gates has stressed that whenever the United States begins reducing troops in Iraq, it must be careful not to leave the country in chaos, which he warned could spread throughout the region.

Completing a four-day visit through the Middle East, Mr. Gates stopped briefly in Abu Dhabi on Thursday for talks with Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates. On Wednesday, he took a helicopter tour of the port in Kuwait that would be vital for removing military equipment when a withdrawal does begin in Iraq.

Earlier, he stopped in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

In addition to asking for help from Arab allies in stabilizing Iraq, Mr. Gates asked officials to toughen their enforcement of United Nations sanctions against Iran and discussed arms sales with each of the countries, part of an estimated $20 billion the United States wants to provide to Persian Gulf countries.

A senior Defense Department official said Mr. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who joined him in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, stressed what they called the need for Arab governments to support the administration’s effort to isolate Iran, diplomatically and economically.

“There’s not really room for bystanders here,” Mr. Gates said.

Iraqi Boy Loses 5 Brothers

BAGHDAD, Aug. 2 — A weeping boy was found Thursday next to the bodies of his five brothers after they were kidnapped and killed by insurgents near Kirkuk, the police said.

The boy’s brothers, all adults, appeared to have been ambushed as they were on their way to paint a police station in Rashad, near Kirkuk, the oil-rich northern city where there have been tensions between Kurds, Turkmens and Sunni Arabs.

The boy, who was unharmed, was apparently brought along to help his brothers, Brig. Gen. Sarhat Qadir said. Many Iraqis who work with the Americans or the Iraqi government’s security forces are sought out by extremists, who accuse them of being collaborators.

Large areas in the western parts of Baghdad were without running water on Thursday, in 120-degree summer heat. Officials blamed their inability to keep the water-purification and pumping stations going for the electricity shortages.

Many Baghdad residents complain that they have water for only a few hours a day, and sometimes no electricity at all.

    Gates Offers Blunt Review of Progress in Iraq, NYT, 3.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/03/washington/03military.html

At Hussein Grave,

Legend Lives as Fury Simmers

August 3, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS

AWJA, Iraq — The grave site has a forlorn, even jumbled air. There are filigreed inscriptions hailing him as a martyr, as a hero of the insurgency and as “the eagle of the Arabs,” his favorite sobriquet. But alongside these there is the mundane bric-a-brac of his life — a carved wooden eagle hung with his personal prayer beads, and a gallery of informal photographs, one showing him with a cigar.

Saddam Hussein’s burial place, in his native village on the banks of the Tigris, may be the only public space in Iraq where the former ruler, hanged in December at the age of 69, is openly extolled. Under a decree dating from the American occupation in 2003, still in force under the new Iraqi government, all paintings, photographs and statues of Mr. Hussein are forbidden, as are public protests in his support. At least in terms of public hagiography, he remains, everywhere else in Iraq, a nonperson.

But in Awja, Mr. Hussein’s legend lives on, though only as a pale shadow of what it was. The old reception center where he lies — renamed “Martyrs’ Hall” by the family members who manage it — has none of the grandeur of the palaces he built during his 24-year rule. The trickle of visitors drops on some days to twos and threes, and only rarely reaches double figures, far short of making Awja a pilgrimage site on the scale of Iraq’s religious shrines.

Part of the problem is the danger — in death as in life — that envelops all that involves Mr. Hussein. Since his burial, no other Western reporter has reached the site, though it lies less than three miles from the center of Tikrit, a strategic city long garrisoned by American forces that is now under the control of the Iraqi Army and police. Reaching here required what amounted to a guarantee of safe conduct from the sheik of Mr. Hussein’s Albu Nasir tribe and from other people in Awja with links to the “national resistance,” Sunni insurgents who control many of the riverbank villages and towns around Tikrit, the capital of Salahuddin Province.

The site itself offers mixed messages. On broken ground outside the hall, behind a line of wilting sunflowers, Mr. Hussein’s family has buried six others, including his two oldest sons, Uday and Qusay, whose brutishness and greed, unfiltered by the propaganda that made a mythic figure of Mr. Hussein, made them among the most hated people in Iraq. Three others buried near them were associates who stood trial with Mr. Hussein and were hanged in the same dank prison chamber in Baghdad within weeks of his execution at dawn on Dec. 30.

The scant flow of visitors reflects, too, the chaos that has supplanted the tyranny Iraq endured under Mr. Hussein. Awja, 100 miles north of Baghdad, is in the middle of a fiercely contested war zone, where American troops passing on Iraq’s main north-south highway, flanking the village, are regularly ambushed and bombed by insurgents. Along with that, there is continuing fury among Mr. Hussein’s loyalists at his overthrow, trial and hanging, a mood that simmers so strongly at Awja that outsiders — indeed, any but Mr. Hussein’s established loyalists — have generally stayed away.

The grave site, humble as it is, reflects something more than a hometown’s determination to honor a fallen son, something that seems irreducible in the politics of Iraq: the refusal of the Sunni minority, who ruled Iraq for centuries until Mr. Hussein’s overthrow, to reconcile themselves to the assumption of power by the Shiite majority who won elections godfathered by the American occupation authority.

Mr. Hussein was far from the beloved figure his propagandists depicted, even among the people of his home region. Not far into many conversations, people here speak of the ruthless killing that characterized his rule, of Sunnis as well as of his principal victims, Shiites and Kurds.

And they point to the 128-building palace complex Mr. Hussein built on a rise above the Tigris in Tikrit. For three years an American military command complex but largely abandoned now, the complex is cited by locals as proof of how Mr. Hussein used Iraq’s oil wealth to benefit himself, his family and a coterie of loyalists, not the ordinary people of Awja or Tikrit.

“Saddam Hussein led the country into destruction, and in doing so destroyed himself and his family, and led us into the present chaos,” said Abdullah Hussein Ejbarah, the 50-year-old deputy governor of Salahuddin Province. Like many senior officials here, Mr. Ejbarah is a former high-ranking member of Mr. Hussein’s Baath Party, and was a fast-rising officer in the Special Republican Guard, an elite military unit, until members of Mr. Ejbarah’s Jabouri tribe tried to assassinate Mr. Hussein in 1993. Mr. Ejbarah was lucky to escape the purge that followed.

Now, he treads an uneasy path as an intermediary between the American military command, with a huge regional headquarters for northern Iraq at Camp Speicher, five miles northwest of Tikrit, and the shadowy oligarchy that holds much of the real power in Salahuddin: the province’s powerful tribal sheiks and, in silent league with them, the insurgents known by the Americans as “former regime elements” — men who were once senior Baath Party officials, Hussein-era military officers and secret police agents, who now direct many of the attacks on American troops.

It was Mr. Ejbarah, along with the Tikrit governor and the leader of Mr. Hussein’s tribe, who flew by American helicopter to Baghdad on the day of Mr. Hussein’s hanging and waged an argument deep into the night against the new Iraqi government’s plans to bury Mr. Hussein in an unmarked, secret grave.

When the body first arrived from Baghdad in the predawn hours of Dec. 31, Mr. Hussein’s body was buried quickly, to the accompaniment of angry protests, in the interior courtyard of a local mosque, then moved within hours to a caramel-colored, two-story reception hall built by Mr. Hussein as a gift to the village. There, the body lies in a shallow grave dug beneath the building’s rotunda, under a huge chandelier. Covering it are two Iraqi flags of the design used under Mr. Hussein, with the words “God is Great” in his handwriting.

Outside, down a pathway of broken concrete paving stones, lie the remains of the others chosen by Mr. Hussein’s family for burial here, each, like Mr. Hussein, lying with their head toward Mecca. His two sons, killed in a shootout with American troops in Mosul in 2003 and reburied here after Mr. Hussein’s hanging, lie at the back; beside them is Qusay’s son, Mustafa, who was 15 when he died in the shootout with his father.

The other three in the front row, all of whom were hanged, are Mr. Hussein’s half brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, former director of the secret police; Awad al-Bandar, former chief judge of the Revolutionary Court; and Taha Yassin Ramadan, a former vice president.

But it is at Mr. Hussein’s graveside that visitors linger. A remembrance book with perhaps 1,500 signatures shows that most visitors come from the country’s Sunni heartland, predominantly from the provinces of Salahuddin, Anbar, Baghdad, Diyala and Nineveh, all insurgent strongholds.

On a back wall hangs a further reminder of the insurgency, a black banner inscribed with a message in golden thread: “Gift from the Adhamiya mujahedeen,” a hard-line Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad that was the birthplace of the Baath Party in Iraq.

The condolence messages are replete with references to Mr. Hussein as a martyr, with prayers that God speed him to reward in “his wide heavens.” But many, too, echo the themes Mr. Hussein pressed in his courtroom harangues in the last 15 months of his life — damnation to Iraq’s American occupiers, to Iran as the backer of the Shiite religious parties that now rule here, and to Israel.

“May God bless Comrade Saddam Hussein, and have mercy upon him,” wrote a Baath Party visitor in May who gave his name as Comrade Abu Qaysar. He added, “By the will of God, victory will soon be ours, and we will liberate our beloved Iraq from the claws of the Zionists and their followers.”

    At Hussein Grave, Legend Lives as Fury Simmers, NYT, 3.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/03/world/middleeast/03saddam.html?hp

3 U.S. Soldiers Dead in Baghdad

August 1, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:02 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Three U.S. soldiers were killed and six wounded by a sophisticated armor-piercing bomb in eastern Baghdad, the U.S. military said Wednesday.

An explosively-formed penetrator, or EFP, detonated near the soldiers' patrol during combat operations on Tuesday, the military said in a statement.

The victims' names were withheld pending family notification.

3 U.S. Soldiers Dead in Baghdad, NYT, 1.8.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq-US-Casualties.html