This is Baghdad. This is graduate-level s–t!

September 11th, 2006

Today the Iraq war is heavy on my heart — awhile back I asked you to pray for my dear friends grandson, Matt, as he was deployed to Baghdad last month; his wife, a returnee from the Iraqi theatre last year, was emotionally fragile, mustered out with PTSD and other problems, and it was worrisome to leave her but there was no “help” from his command; he was needed. Within hours of his departure, everything that could go wrong did, and with a vengeance … the circumstances would have made a strong man buckle; as we knew she would, she did. She ended up in a Vets hospital for evaluation … with her four year old daughter waiting for almost an hour at a bus stop after her first day at kindergarten with no mom in sight … mom was in lock-down 90 miles away.

Her grandmother, my friend, did everything she knew to do, she on the left coast and her loved ones on the right; she was unable to get through to her grandson … finally she contacted the Red Cross. They were, it turns out, no help … simply none; the “new normal” in this nation is YOYO. You’re on your own. The wife, the three children would have to shift for themselves … leaving behind financial disasters, emotional damage, even frantic struggle for survival. With the compliments of a grateful nation.

And you would think that there would be “community kindness” to rely on, wouldn’t you? That we’d all pull together? It’s only there in dribs and drabs … it can’t be counted on. On very real psychic levels, the public does not “own” this war, it doesn’t factor it in to daily life. No sacrifices have been asked for … no “coming together” has been promoted. This war is “invisible” on so many levels … it steers our politics but it doesn’t have reality for us. Perhaps if we saw the caskets … if we heard more than a list of names at the end of a newscast. As painful as it was, I yearn for the “old days” of kaleidoscopic-colored footage of napalm drops and the whack-whack-whack sound of Huey blades … at least back in ‘Nam we KNEW our nation was slowly leaking its lifeblood.

Eventually, my friends grandson in Iraq received her frantic email … and was told that he could not take emergency leave … because “they’ve already lost too many.”

If that last line chills you, it should. Think about the numbers we hear … reported today, 2,663 US soldiers have died in Iraq, while 19,910 have been wounded. Just sit with that number for a moment. Almost twenty thousand warriors have come home maimed and mutilated … and less than three thousand have actually died. Does that sound reasonable? Information Clearing House has had an estimate of over a quarter million Iraqi civilians perished on it’s front page for months and months … we have no idea the actual number, but it’s growing daily. And ONLY 3000 American soldiers have died? Who are they kidding!!

But the Big Lies they tell aren’t the most of it … the most of it is what plays out in personal lives, rips families apart … and how those sorrows ripple out to touch and wound all of us. Yet the war remains what’s happening “over there,” not here … the stuff of rhetoric and posturing, but not something that comes into our living room on the nightly news and asks us to participate in any way except with our Hearty Cheer when we hear the Decider say for the zillionth time that we will “stay the course.”

My friend knows now that the military, the social services in place for these emergencies, have nothing to offer for trouble or sorrow — nothing but snafu and cold reality; the Red Cross, she says, must belong to FEMA. The articles below give us more of the same — and some revealing looks at who did what [or didn't.]

War is madness. It is a blind and chilling attack upon the heart of humanity. We ALL pay this price, but none so much as those whose lives have been gutted and routed and ruined … and to which we are asked to pay little or no attention.

Tie a yellow ribbon on that tree in your front yard, or hang one your door knocker; our kids are being held hostage in Iraq to a psychotic dream of power and oil. They don’t belong there — they NEVER belonged there. AND WE WANT THEM HOME NOW.

Jude

For US Troops and Their Families, Iraq War’s Invisible Costs Keep Piling Up
Michael Hastings, Newsweek
Sunday 10 September 2006
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14757928/site/newsweek/

Sept. 18, 2006 Issue - Toward the end of July, Capt. Brad Velotta began daydreaming a lot. He thought about making the summer’s last run of salmon in Alaska’s Russian River, where bears lumber down from the woods and chase fishermen out of the water. He thought about getting a kitten for his 3-year-old daughter, Sophia. Most of all, Velotta hoped to see his 83-year-old grandmother Mary one last time before she died of cancer. “She thought she could hold on,” says Velotta’s father, Albert, at the family home in Alexandria, La. Her grandson was supposed to leave Iraq on Aug. 2. “She thought it would only be a few weeks more.”

But it wasn’t. On July 26, Velotta learned that he and his unit, the 172nd Stryker Brigade, were going not home but to the core of Iraq’s sectarian blood feud: Baghdad. After a solid year of battling the insurgency, from Mosul to Tall Afar to the westernmost reaches of Al Anbar province, the 172nd has been extended until after Thanksgiving - if not later. Velotta, 29, Blackhawk Company commander in the 172nd’s 4-23 infantry battalion, gave a tough talk to his squad leaders: “I know it f—ing sucks. But you don’t have the option to not be motivated. You don’t have the privilege to be worn out. This is Baghdad. This is graduate-level s–t.”

No one has to tell the 4-23 that every war is cruel. Its members freely admit they’ve been luckier than a lot of units in Iraq. The 172nd has lost fewer than 20 of its roughly 4,000 troops in the past year, and the 4-23 has had no one killed in action. Their record in the field, along with their almost indestructible armored vehicles, made the 172nd an obvious choice to clean out Baghdad’s sectarian death squads. “We were victims of our own success,” says Capt. Phillip Mann, the 4-23’s intelligence officer. Even so, the war’s emotional and spiritual costs keep rising for them and their loved ones back home. Velotta’s little girl tells of bad dreams that he’s going to die. “No, baby,” her mother says. “He is coming home” - wishing she could be sure of that. The wedding of Spc. Shawn Mott and Nina Herrera was set for Sept. 16. Eight hours after she mailed the invitations, he called to say he had to go to Baghdad instead of flying home. “I was so scared to call you,” he told her afterward. “I thought you’d leave”

The Army says troop morale remains high. For the first 11 months of fiscal 2006, two out of three soldiers who were eligible to re-enlist have done so - a rate unchanged since 9/11. But whatever the numbers say, the strain is showing. Capt. John Grauer, the 4-23’s chaplain, describes the scene when the order came down: “There was a rush of soldiers trying to get on the phone to call home. Some literally threw up when they heard the news. Some were extremely angry … Some went to sleep for a couple of days, hoping maybe it was all a bad dream.” It was tough for Grauer to tell his wife, Tyra, and their two girls - especially Morriah, 9. “She started crying,” he says. “That’s when I put the sunglasses on.” Behind the shades, he wept.

Back home, the news hit hard. Some 172nd wives are too proud to complain. “At least our husbands are out there saving the world,” says one. “They’re not wussies just sitting there on the couch.” But at Fort Richardson, Alaska, the 4-23rd’s home base, chaos erupted at the announcement of the extension. Some wives had already packed up and shipped their household goods to their husbands’ next duty stations. There were families without a place to live; children pre-enrolled in schools thousands of miles away; parents scrambling for winter clothing they had given away; household goods in storage; airplane tickets for vacations that could not be taken - not to mention thousands of broken hearts. Grauer says soldiers have told him, “This has killed my marriage, It’s been my third deployment in five years, and we’ve only spent 15 months together.”

Staff Sgt. Chad Denton is on his second deployment. “It takes its toll,” says his wife, Beth, back home in Anchorage. “You just don’t know each other anymore.” The Dentons have five children, 1 to 13 years old, and the two middle sons, 6 and 8, are having trouble. “They need their dad,” Beth says. “I keep telling him, ‘I know you guys are getting blown up, but I’d rather be on that side, doing what you’re doing, than on this side, being mom and dad’.” Telling her about the extension was “brutal,” says Chad. “At first she said she couldn’t believe it. I guess there are three stages: denial, shock … ” His voice trails off. He doesn’t get to the third stage.

The 172nd is in the thick of Baghdad’s largest military action since 2003. U.S. and Iraqi officials call it the Battle of Baghdad. Gen. George Casey, head of all Coalition forces in Iraq, told 172nd officers it’s “the defining moment, the defining battle of the war.” This summer’s sectarian violence was the worst Baghdad has seen since the war began, with roughly 1,800 killings in July alone, according to the Iraqi Health Ministry. Large parts of the city have fallen into virtual anarchy. Privately, senior U.S. officials say the Iraqi government has only a few months to stop the killing or collapse.

The Stryker teams are supposed to hold the line. They spend their days searching bad neighborhoods for weapons and evidence of death-squad activities. But Baghdad, like much of Iraq, is suffering from “whack-a-mole” syndrome. The militias keep popping up elsewhere. “With two Stryker brigades, one on the east side, one on the west side, we could secure Baghdad,” says a 172nd officer, who asks not to be named disputing Coalition strategy. Even then, he adds, it would take more than four months to finish the job. As things stand, many 4-23 members say the sweeps are no more than a temporary fix. Some argue that the aim is only to make Iraq look good before the Nov. 7 U.S. elections - “fighting for the House of Representatives,” as Sgt. Brian Patton describes it.

Meanwhile, families are falling apart. Back in Alaska, one 4-23 wife has a suicidal child in the hospital; another suffered an ectopic pregnancy and had to beg her husband’s commander to let him come home to care for her. Another wife attempted suicide. Her husband was sent home, but his career, the other wives say, is over. Gossip is running wild: who drinks too much, who has a compulsive-gambling problem, whose kids are left untended.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld got a taste of this rage and frustration in August when he met with family members of the 172nd at Fort Wainwright, near Fairbanks, Alaska. In a video of the meeting obtained by NEWSWEEK, one woman asked him why the 172nd was spending most of its time clearing houses, instead of patrolling the streets in the relative safety of the big armored vehicles. “My husband hasn’t set foot in his Stryker since he arrived in Baghdad,” she said. “Over 90 percent of the house clearings are being handled by the Iraqis,” Rumsfeld responded, whereupon women in the audience began shouting “No!” and “That’s not true!” Flummoxed, Rumsfeld shot back, “No? What do you mean? Don’t say ‘No,’ that’s what I’ve been told. It’s the task of the Iraqis to go through the buildings.”

The 4-23’s soldiers say they, not the Iraqis, do 95 percent of the searches. “I’d like to punch [Rumsfeld] in the gut,” says one seasoned NCO on his second Iraq tour. “He treats us like we’re not human. He acts like he’s not destroying families.”

Baghdad in August breeds thoughts like that. Outside it’s 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Inside a Stryker armored vehicle it’s 130, sometimes 140. Team members sweat more than seems humanly possible. Their mustaches leak with sweat. Their soaked pants leave damp marks where they sit. The sweat collects in the protective goggles they wear, pouring off the eyebrows and into the lenses. Each soldier has to wear 15-pound side plates, 20-pound body armor, and a three-pound helmet that feels like it’s baking the brain. When the vehicle stops, the teams dismount and go to work, climbing stairs, scaling walls, breaking down doors - always watching out for snipers and booby traps.

The unit has had plenty of close calls. Capt. Benjamin Nagy, who goes by the nickname Ox, has been hit by 15 IEDs. Chaplain Grauer has been IED’d seven times. Strykers routinely drive away unscathed from explosions that would kill everyone in a Humvee. Sometimes Velotta’s men, sick of the drudgery of house searches, say things like: “Please, can someone just shoot at us?” But a single call over the radio can turn the tedium into something far worse. In the Adamiyah neighborhood, a soldier from another 172nd unit, the 4-14, recently became the extension’s first loss. He was shot in the face by a sniper and died a week later after being evacuated to a hospital in Germany.
——–

Postscript: Mary Velotta died on Aug. 19. Her grandson missed the funeral.

With Scott Johnson in Baghdad, Karen Breslau in Anchorage, John Barry and Michael Hirsh in Washington, Catharine Skipp in Alexandria and Margaret Friedenauer in Fairbanks

Recounting a fallen Marine’s last days
John Fenton, The North Jersey Media Group
Tuesday 05 September 2006
http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkxNCZmZ2JlbDdmN3ZxZWVFRXl5Njk4OTE1Mg

In the four months since the death of my son, Sgt. Matthew J. Fenton, from injuries suffered in Iraq, I have stated many times the horror of what I saw in the National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Md.

I believe that the time has arrived to tell the whole story of his death and the carnage that was inflicted on some of his fellow Marines. I do not find this easy to do, but as the death toll and injured number continues to climb, I cannot sit silently.

On April 26, Matthew, 24, was the gunner on a Humvee protecting a Marine convoy on the outskirts of Fallujah. A suicide car bomber attempted to ram his Humvee, and he got off a few shots at the vehicle. From what I have been told it is common practice for these bombers to detonate their bomb if they come under fire. Matthew was the only Marine injured in the attack. Later that same day I received a phone call telling me that Matt was seriously wounded and that it was a head injury.

The next day we were informed that Matt had been flown to Germany. Matt’s mother, Diane, and I prepared to go to Germany. But in the middle of trying to get a flight, we received another call saying that he had stabilized and they were going to fly him to the United States. We were all lifted by this seemingly good news.

Diane and I flew to Washington the next day and were met by a uniformed Marine and driven to Bethesda. What awaited us there is still shocking to me now. We met with two doctors who laid everything out for us. Matthew’s injury was a devastating one. Shrapnel had entered his head just above his left eye and traveled diagonally through his brain and exited the right rear.

‘A Nightmare’
Surgeons in Baghdad had removed two plates from his skull to help relieve the pressure from the swelling of his brain. The frontal lobe was destroyed, so they had removed it. It was explained that the frontal lobe is the center of personality and the place where someone is aware of themselves. The Matthew that we knew and loved was gone and would never come back.

As we struggled with that staggering news there was more to come. The shrapnel had done severe damage to both sides of Matt’s brain because of the angle that it traveled through. The brain can figure a way to control functions when one side is damaged, like in a stroke. But this was devastating news. The doctors told us that if this had happened in Vietnam, there would have been no surgery. If this happened in front of the best hospital in New York City, there would have been no surgery. His chances of ever having meaningful movement were less than slim.

Why, we asked was the surgery done in Baghdad? The answer, surgeons do whatever they can to keep a soldier alive. They do not decide life or death.

We were then led down a long hospital corridor toward my son’s room. This is the moment that I will never forget until the day I die. Just outside his room we were instructed that we had to don gowns, masks and gloves every time we entered the room. This was to prevent us from picking up bacteria that Matt may have brought back from Iraq and spreading it to other patients in the ward.

My shock was doubled upon seeing Matthew. He was unrecognizable. His head was completely swollen, like some cartoon character. There were maybe hundreds of metal staples in his head. There were of course tubes coming and going everywhere. There were drains running from the site of the surgery. And there was the ventilator. I immediately snapped at the doctors. Somewhere along the line I had been informed that Matt was breathing on his own. Nine years ago I watched my father die after having lung cancer surgery. He never got off of the ventilator, and I flashed back to that time.

Matthew was able to breathe on his own, the doctors explained. The ventilator was only assisting. His heart and lungs were perfect. There had been no damage to his brain stem, which controls involuntary actions like breathing and the heart beating. So there we were looking at our son, not recognizing him, not a scratch on him below his eyes. But his face and head mangled and inflated. This must be a nightmare, one that we will never wake up from.

What War Leaves Behind
For days we made that walk down that long hallway. It took some time but I finally was able to look at some of the other Marines on the ward with Matthew. I wish to this moment that I hadn’t. Kids with horrible injuries.

One had been in the ward for 11 months, after seven different brain surgeries. His wife refused to let him go. She was praying for a miracle. He had parts of his skull removed also, but all the swelling was gone now and his head had sunken in where they had been removed. He did not move at all.

Across the ward another Marine was in his third month, and his head was all sunken in. This is what lay ahead for Matthew also. Also across the ward was another Marine who was there only a few days before Matt. He was lucky, damage to only one side of his brain. I became friendly with his father, Jim, from Tennessee. One day there was an uproar from his son’s room and I looked over and made eye contact with Jim. Maybe an hour later we met in the hallway and he apologized to me. His son had opened his eyes for the first time and his family just responded. There was no need for an apology as I would have jumped for joy if Matthew were to open his eyes.

All that was left was to decide when the life support would be removed. That final decision rested in the hands of his mother. There was no disagreement on what course to follow, just when.

On May 3, the Marine Corps commandant presented Matthew with his Purple Heart. On May 4, I noticed that the swelling of Matthew’s head was going down. By the end of the day the indentations where pieces of his skull were missing were becoming noticeable. The next morning I was dreading what he might be looking like. And, yes, there was his head becoming very odd shaped.

Letting go
I prayed that Diane would find the strength to let her son go today. I did not want to see him decline another day. Another day of watching his head sink into his skull. And neither did she. Sometime around noon on May 5, Matthew was moved from the ward to a private room. Behind some curtains they removed the ventilator and most of the tubes. He was kept on the morphine, and we were assured he would not feel any pain. Now he was breathing all on his own. Diane got into the hospital bed with her son, and I held his hand and we all waited and watched for Matthew to pass.

But he would not go easily. After three hours of labored breathing, I asked the nurse if there was anything that she could do. No. I asked God to take him now. No. His mother told him to go. I asked him to go. Go to some peace. A half-hour later, he finally took his last breath.

This is the real story of the war in Iraq. We all know the numbers, and we all know the reasons that are claimed that we have to be there. But this is the reality: young, brave, patriotic men losing their lives for a cause that keeps shifting.

Every politician who supports the war should go to Bethesda or Walter Reed and see just what their support is costing in human life and suffering. And to everyone who opposes the war, don’t just sit back any longer. Someday you may be touched personally by some tragedy from this disastrous war, and it will be too late, like it is for me.

Justice for G.I.s?
Say Iraq Uranium Caused Ills
Juan Gonzalez
Friday, September 9, 2006 by the New York Daily News
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0908-26.htm

Three years after returning from Iraq with persistent ailments they believe were caused by inhaling uranium dust from exploded U.S. shells, a group of former New York National Guardsmen finally got their first day in court this week against the federal government.

In a two-hour hearing late Wednesday before Manhattan Federal Judge John Koeltl, lawyers for the eight veterans argued that the Army caused the soldiers’ illnesses when it violated its own safety protocols and exposed them to radioactive depleted-uranium dust.

Army doctors also covered up information about any exposures and failed to provide the soldiers proper medical treatment, the lawyers claimed.

The case is the first to reach a courtroom from Iraq war soldiers claiming harm from depleted uranium - a low-level radioactive metal the Pentagon began using during the first Persian Gulf War to harden artillery shells so they could penetrate enemy tanks.

Assistant U.S. Attorney John Cronan, representing the Army, urged Koeltl to dismiss the lawsuit immediately.

Cronan repeatedly referred to a 1950 Supreme Court decision, commonly known as the Feres Doctrine, that prohibits soldiers from suing the government for injuries “incident to [military] service.”

“Any trial of this would be second-guessing sensitive military matters that civilian courts should not be discussing,” Cronan said.

As the government’s lawyer spoke, Gerard Matthew, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, who was sitting with his wife Janise in a courtroom packed with supporters, quietly shook his head.

A former Army specialist who transported destroyed tanks from Iraq back to Kuwait during the first months of the war, Matthew returned home in September 2003 with a variety of ailments for which Army doctors could not explain the cause. They included constant migraine headaches, blurred vision, blackouts and a burning sensation whenever he urinated.

On June 29, 2004, his wife gave birth to a baby girl, Victoria, who was missing three fingers on one hand. Tests of Matthew’s urine sponsored by the Daily News in early 2004 showed that he had been exposed to depleted uranium, according to Axel Gerdes, the scientist at Goethe University in Frankfurt, who performed the analysis.

Gerdes also found that four of nine other returned soldiers from a different National Guard unit, the 442nd Military Police, had been exposed to the radioactive dust.

Reports in The News created a firestorm that reached to Congress and received coverage around the world - especially when the New York soldiers, several of them cops and correction officers in civilian life - accused military doctors of refusing to test them for depleted uranium, or losing or delaying their test results.

Since then, the Pentagon has tightened its testing procedures and some two dozen state legislatures have either passed or are considering bills to require depleted uranium testing for their own National Guard troops returning from Iraq.

Tuesday’s hearing was a chilling review of how the courts have dealt over more than half a century with massive injuries inflicted by our own military weapons against American troops.

Both Cronan and the lawyers for the plaintiffs, George Zelma and Elise Hagouel Langsam, referred repeatedly to prior cases of soldiers exposed to atom bomb testing during World War II, to the massive illnesses that afflicted Vietnam War soldiers from Agent Orange, even to secret LSD testing among soldiers by the Army during the 1970s.

“It can’t be that Congress intended our government to betray its own troops,” Zelma said at one point.

By his dogged questioning of lawyers from both sides, it appeared that Koeltl was giving the claims from the soldiers serious attention. But he gave no hint of how he might rule.

“We’re here to speak for all our fellow soldiers who don’t even know what they’ve been exposed to in Iraq,” Matthew said afterward. “The Army didn’t even follow its own procedures to protect us, and someone needs to answer for that.”

“He Would Fire the Next Person That Said That”
Kevin Drum, The Washington Monthly
Friday 08 September 2006
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_09/009469.php

Today, via Orin Kerr, comes a remarkable interview with Brigadier General Mark Scheid, chief of the Logistics War Plans Division after 9/11, and one of the people with primary responsibility for war planning. Shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan, he says, Donald Rumsfeld told his team to start planning for war in Iraq, but not to bother planning for a long stay:

“The secretary of defense continued to push on us … that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we’re going to take out the regime, and then we’re going to leave,” Scheid said. “We won’t stay.”

Scheid said the planners continued to try “to write what was called Phase 4,” or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.

Even if the troops didn’t stay, “at least we have to plan for it,” Scheid said.

“I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that,” Scheid said. “We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

“He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war.”

…”In his own mind he thought we could go in and fight and take out the regime and come out. But a lot of us planners were having a real hard time with it because we were also thinking we can’t do this. Once you tear up a country you have to stay and rebuild it. It was very challenging.”

In a way, this is old news. As much as it beggars the imagination, there’s been plenty of evidence all along that Bush never took the idea of rebuilding Iraq seriously. The plan was to remove Saddam from power, claim victory, and get out.

However, this is the clearest evidence I’ve seen yet. The guy who was actually in charge of logistics has now directly confirmed that Rumsfeld not only didn’t intend to rebuild Iraq in any serious way, but threatened to fire anyone who wasted time on the idea. Needless to say, he wouldn’t have done this unless it reflected the wishes of the president.

And this also means that all of Bush’s talk about democracy was nothing but hot air. If you’re serious about planting democracy after a war, you don’t plan to simply topple a government and then leave.

So: the lack of postwar planning wasn’t merely the result of incompetence. It was deliberate policy. There was never any intention of rebuilding Iraq and there was never any intention of wasting time on democracy promotion. That was merely a post hoc explanation after we failed to find the promised WMD. Either that or BG Scheid is lying.

This is an astounding interview, all the more so for the apparently resigned tone that Scheid brings to it. It belongs on the front page of the New York Times, not the Hampton Roads Daily Press.
——–

POSTSCRIPT: An alternative explanation, based on Rumsfeld’s admonition that “the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war,” is that Rumsfeld and Bush were planning to stay but simply lied about it in order to build support for the war. However, based on the rest of the interview with Scheid, as well as the other evidence that there was no plan to stay and rebuild in any serious way, that explanation seems unlikely. The bulk of the evidence continues to suggest that democracy and rebuilding were simply not on Bush’s radar.

Eustis Chief: Iraq Post-War Plan Muzzled
Stephanie Heinatz, The Daily Press
Friday 08 September 2006
http://www.dailypress.com/news/dp-21075sy0sep08,0,2264542.story

Army Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, an early planner of the war, tells about challenges of invasion and rebuilding.

Fort Eustis - Months before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday.

In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said “he would fire the next person” who talked about the need for a post-war plan.

Rumsfeld did replace Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff in 2003, after Shinseki told Congress that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to secure post-war Iraq.

Scheid, who is also the commander of Fort Eustis in Newport News, made his comments in an interview with the Daily Press. He retires in about three weeks.

Scheid doesn’t go so far as calling for Rumsfeld to resign. He’s listened as other retired generals have done so.

“Everybody has a right to their opinion,” he said. “But what good did it do?”

Scheid’s comments are further confirmation of the version of events reported in “Cobra II:

The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq,” the book by New York Times reporter Michael R. Gordon and retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor.

In 2001, Scheid was a colonel with the Central Command, the unit that oversees U.S. military operations in the Mideast.

On Sept. 10, 2001, he was selected to be the chief of logistics war plans.

On Sept. 11, 2001, he said, “life just went to hell.”

That day, Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of Central Command, told his planners, including Scheid, to “get ready to go to war.”

A day or two later, Rumsfeld was “telling us we were going to war in Afghanistan and to start building the war plan. We were going to go fast.

“Then, just as we were barely into Afghanistan … Rumsfeld came and told us to get ready for Iraq.”

Scheid said he remembers everyone thinking, “My gosh, we’re in the middle of Afghanistan, how can we possibly be doing two at one time? How can we pull this off? It’s just going to be too much.”

Planning was kept very hush-hush in those early days.

“There was only a handful of people, maybe five or six, that were involved with that plan because it had to be kept very, very quiet.”

There was already an offensive plan in place for Iraq, Scheid said. And in the beginning, the planners were just expanding on it.

“Whether we were going to execute it, we had no idea,” Scheid said.

Eventually other military agencies - like the transportation and Army materiel commands - had to get involved.

They couldn’t just “keep planning this in the dark,” Scheid said.

Planning continued to be a challenge.

“The secretary of defense continued to push on us … that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we’re going to take out the regime, and then we’re going to leave,” Scheid said. “We won’t stay.”

Scheid said the planners continued to try “to write what was called Phase 4,” or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.

Even if the troops didn’t stay, “at least we have to plan for it,” Scheid said.

“I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that,” Scheid said. “We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

“He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war.”

Why did Rumsfeld think that? Scheid doesn’t know.

“But think back to those times. We had done Bosnia. We said we were going into Bosnia and stop the fighting and come right out. And we stayed.”

Was Rumsfeld right or wrong?

Scheid said he doesn’t know that either.

“In his own mind he thought we could go in and fight and take out the regime and come out. But a lot of us planners were having a real hard time with it because we were also thinking we can’t do this. Once you tear up a country you have to stay and rebuild it. It was very challenging.”

Even if the people who laid out the initial war plans had fleshed out post-invasion missions, the fighting and insurgent attacks going on today would have been hard to predict, Scheid said.

“We really thought that after the collapse of the regime we were going to do all these humanitarian type things,” he said. “We thought this would go pretty fast and we’d be able to get out of there. We really didn’t anticipate them to continue to fight the way they did or come back the way they are.

“Now we’re going more toward a civil war. We didn’t see that coming.”

While Scheid, a soldier since 1977, spoke candidly about the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq, he remains concerned about the American public’s view of the troops.

He’s bothered by the nationwide divide over the war and fearful that patriotism among citizens will continue to decline.

“We’re really hurting right now,” he said.

Daily Press researcher Tracy Sorensen contributed to this report.

Rockefeller: Bush Duped Public On Iraq
CBS
Sept. 9, 2006
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/09/eveningnews/main1990644.shtml

When the Senate Intelligence Committee released a declassified version of its findings this past week, the Republican chairman of the committee, Pat Roberts, left town without doing interviews, calling the report a rehash of unfounded partisan allegations.

Its statements like this one, made Feb. 5, 2003, by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell that have become so controversial, implying Iraq was linked to terror attacks.

“Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associated collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants,” Powell said.

But after 2 1/2 years of reviewing pre-war intelligence behind closed doors, the lead Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, who voted for the Iraq War, says the Bush administration pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.

“The absolute cynical manipulation, deliberately cynical manipulation, to shape American public opinion and 69 percent of the people, at that time, it worked, they said ‘we want to go to war,’” Rockefeller told CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. “Including me. The difference is after I began to learn about some of that intelligence I went down to the Senate floor and I said ‘my vote was wrong.’”

Rockefeller went a step further. He says the world would be better off today if the United States had never invaded Iraq — even if it means Saddam Hussein would still be running Iraq.

He said he sees that as a better scenario, and a safer scenario, “because it is called the ‘war on terror.’”

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

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