The Turning Point

               On November 12, 2003, Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, U.S. Military commander in Iraq held a press conference in Baghdad. During this conference, General Sanchez stated that the US had arrived at a “turning point” in the conflict with Iraqi resistance fighters. The General also said  “..we are going to win this battle, and this war… they cannot defeat us, and they know it. I am supremely confident of this reality.”

               When General Sanchez assumed command five months before his press conference, attacks on American troops and civilian personnel averaged six a day. At the time of his conference, these attacks had increased to 30 to 35 a day. The number of wounded has been reliably reported, from German but not US sources, to be more than 10,000 since the end of hostilities and the officially acknowledged number of dead is in serious question. General Sanchez strongly denied any similarity with the Vietnam quagmire but he also said he was determined to “win the hearts and minds of” 25 million Iraqis.

               This statement was a favorite of President Lyndon Johnson’s during the Vietnam debacle. Henceforth, all of our reportage of the military activities in Iraq will be under the heading of The Turning Point.

               Several hours after the General’s press conference, Iraqi partisans shelled the General’s heavily defended compound with mortars.

On November 25, Paul Bremer, American Viceroy in Iraq, following a Washington conference with the President and his staff, issued his own fiercely upbeat assessment

— Far fewer Americans have been killed in guerrilla attacks in recent days, L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator here, said Tuesday. Instead, he said, the insurgents have turned to killing other Iraqis.

"The security situation has changed," Mr. Bremer said during a news conference. "They have failed to intimidate the coalition. They have now begun a pattern of trying to intimidate innocent Iraqis."                                        

               Hours later, guerrillas fired mortars or rockets toward the walled compound where he and other American occupation authorities live and work but apparently missed and hit a building and a road nearby. From: New York Times, Nov. 25, 2003.

The most confident assessment yet was offered at a news conference on Tuesday, January 6, 2004 by Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. General Swannack's operational area includes a swath to the west and south of Baghdad, including some of the hottest trouble spots in the so-called Sunni Triangle, where more than 90 percent of all attacks on American troops have occurred.

The general, a large, imposing figure renowned among his troops for his no-nonsense ways, began his remarks by reminding the reporters that he had appeared in Baghdad six weeks ago, about the time of the insurgents' Ramadan offensive, and had said he believed in his area successes were "turning the corner."

Now, he said, "I'm here to tell you that we've turned that corner."

"I can also tell you that we are on a glide path towards success, as attacks on our forces have declined by almost 60 percent over the past month," he continued. From: New York Times, January 8, 2004.

On the following day, January 7, Iraqi resistance units, who were unaware of General Swannack’s optimism, mortared a U.S. military housing unit with at least 35 casualties. On January 8, a U.S. military helicopter was shot down with 9 known dead.

               Here we have additional proof that the Vietnam-style corner has certainly been clearly turned and that the US military units have succeeded in decisively thwarting the terrorist attacks committed by a very small handful of Saddam loyalists on the friendly, democratic rebuilders. Mr. Bremer also is correct: casualties have indeed dropped dramatically since the capture of Saddam Hussein and the liberated, joyful Iraqis are now surging towards a peaceful, democratic government. And soon, oil will flow again!

               Generals Chavez and Swannack as well as Presidential Procounsel Bremer are certainly visionaries: We have indeed turned the corner. Herewith are ongoing chronological examples of how US forces are crushing Iraqi resistance on a daily, and casualty free, basis.

Iraq troop rotation plan: Pentagon prepares for next war
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by James Conachy
13 January 2004

            Over 250,000 US soldiers will leave or arrive in Iraq between now and the end of May in the largest rotation of troops in a combat zone that has been attempted by the American military since World War II. The risks of the massive movement of personnel and hardware are considerable and its implications, given the record of the Bush administration, are ominous. The rotation is designed to allow six battle-hardened US Army divisions that have been worn out by lengthy deployments in 2003 to rest, refit, and be combat-ready again as early as September.

            The active full-time US Army does not have the manpower to both garrison the occupation force in Iraq and conduct another major war. In answer to the critics who had warned of this before the invasion, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared that only 50,000 troops would be needed to maintain control over Iraq within a matter of months. With the first anniversary of the war approaching, however, there are still 130,000 in the country, including 17 of the Army’s 33 active combat brigades and armored cavalry regiments.

            Of the remaining Army strength, two brigades are rotating in or out of Afghanistan and two more are permanently based in South Korea. Two further brigades are undergoing retraining with the Army’s new Stryker vehicles and are not available. The three brigades of the Third Infantry Division, which spearheaded the American assault on Baghdad, only returned from Iraq in August and are still in the 120-day “resetting” period allocated for divisions to return to combat readiness.

            With only seven brigades available and most of the brigades in Iraq having been on deployment for approaching 12 months, Pentagon planners would have had to consider extending tours-of-duty or sending back the Third Infantry after only a six-to-eight-month spell in the US. Instead, the decision was taken to have as much of the Army available for other purposes later in 2004 by reducing the size of the Iraq occupation force and ordering an unprecedented deployment of the Marine Corp and part-time National Guard and reservists. Even the Navy and Air Force have been instructed to send personnel for ground occupation duties in Iraq.

            By mid-2004, the number of American troops in Iraq will have fallen to approximately 105,000, and the number of combat brigades will have fallen from 17 to 13.

            The Marine Corp has been ordered to send 21,500 troops to Iraq to take over policing the west of the country, the first large-scale use of the marines for what is considered a “peace-keeping” operation. The composition of the marine force highlights that the decision to keep the Third Infantry in the US was not due to concern over the impact on morale of another deployment. Most of the marines who are Iraq-bound are from the First Marine Division, which only returned to its California base in May after playing a key combat role in the invasion. It is now going back for at least another seven-month tour-of-duty.

            The Pentagon estimates that some 39,000 of the new troops, close to 40 percent of the total force, will be National Guard or reservists. Over 15,000 National Guard infantry are being sent for 12-month’s frontline duty in some of the most volatile areas of the country such as Baghdad, Mosul and cities in the so-called “Sunni Triangle” such as Tikrit.

            The active Army is therefore only contributing 45,000 to 50,000 troops to Iraq during this year, the number the Bush administration had based its plans around.

Troops at greater risk

            The rotation will cause a temporary increase in the number of US troops in Iraq, due to the overlap of departing and arriving personnel. The military is likely to exploit this to conduct major offensives against the resistance over the coming weeks, at least in part to blood the new forces. Overall, however, the urgency of the Pentagon to get its main combat divisions back into their bases has produced a rotation plan which is permeated with indifference to the lives of rank-and-file soldiers and will place them at far greater risk.

            The Iraqi resistance has proven since the New Year that it has the ability to launch accurate mortar strikes on military bases, shoot down helicopters and hit aircraft over Baghdad International Airport with surface-to-air missiles. The massive troop movement, with tens of thousands of men and thousands of vehicles and aircraft in motion, will produce inevitable logistical complications and afford the resistance plenty of targets.

            “Even if in the US we tried to move 220,000 people out of one airport it would be a nightmare. The magnitude of all this happening simultaneously, there in Iraq, is just overwhelming,” a retired general, William Pagonis, told the Los Angeles Times December 10. The Times noted: “Military planners are massaging the multitude of details of the rotation” where and when helicopters will take troops and over what routes, how to mass departing troops in the few airports and airstrips in Iraq without making them sitting ducks and assigning hundreds of soldiers to guard the routes.”

            Helicopters are particularly vulnerable. The Hartford Courant commented November 8: “US forces depend on helicopters such as the Chinook and the Blackhawk to move troops and equipment quickly and efficiently, but the speed and agility comes at a price. They are also large, low-flying targets for an enemy eager to create havoc and kill Americans.”

            As well as having to deal with a greater risk of attack, the troops rotating in are being sent with far less capabilities than the heavily-armored units they are replacing.

            The First Cavalry Division, which is currently preparing to rotate into Iraq, has been ordered to leave two-thirds of its Abram tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles behind in the US and deploy most of its units with humvees instead. The official reason is to enable the armored troops to function as highly mobile infantry. A Washington Post report in September points to another calculation. It appears likely that the troops of the First Cavalry are being sent to Iraq with jeeps so that the Army can focus its maintenance budget on the tanks and Bradleys of the returning troops.

            The US Army budgets to replace the tracks on Bradleys annually, based on an estimate that they will travel 800 miles in the average year. In Iraq, the vehicles have been doing 1,200 miles per month, blowing out fuel costs and requiring new tracks every 60 days. Track supply shortages had left as many as one third of the vehicles unusable at particular times. The divisions that are returning to the US will be bringing back with them thousands of tanks and Bradleys, all of which will require major maintenance. The Post reported that track replacement costs for Bradleys alone had soared from $78 million to $230 million last fiscal year.

            The First Cavalry troops will at least have the armored version of the humvee, which provides some protection against the impact of an improvised explosive device, a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) or heavy machine gun fire. Most troops in Iraq do not even have that. Only one in eight of the thousands of jeeps currently in use by the occupation forces are armored. A military police colonel told Newsday December 14: “We’re kind of sitting ducks in the vehicles we have.” Military planners made the incredible estimate on May 1, 2003, that only 235 armored humvees would be needed for all post-war Iraq. A desperate scramble is underway to increase that to 3,200, but it will take until mid-2005.

            There are also concerns about the Army’s new wheeled, lightly-armored Stryker vehicles that are being used now in Iraq by the newest unit to arrive, the Third Brigade of the Second Infantry Division. While the Strykers feature the latest technology of digitised warfare, they are not designed to take the type of fire that a tank or the Bradleys are capable of sustaining. They also cannot fire accurately except when stationary and their guns must be reloaded from outside the vehicle. The military rushed the deployment of the Strykers, however, without even reinforcing them with an extra outer plate of armor that can withstand the impact of a RPG,one of the preferred weapons of the Iraqi guerrillas.

            Patrick Garrett, an analyst for GlobalSecurity.org, told the Seattle Times: “The Stryker is uniquely controversial.... You’ve got people jumping up and down and screaming bloody murder over this, and you have people who are willing to let the Army try it and see what happens. And everyone will be watching to see how effective they are in Iraq.”

            An assessment published on December 3 by the web site Debka.com made the following chilling observation: “They [Army commanders] expect casualties to rise initially when the new system is first tested in battle. Further improvements will inevitably be called for.”

            On December 15, just a week after the brigade arrived in Iraq, guerrillas destroyed their first Stryker with a roadside bomb outside Balad. One US soldier was wounded.

            The Bush administration is increasingly treating the military demands of occupying Iraq as an annoying diversion from its broader foreign policy objectives. To reduce the need to send any more Army personnel after the rotation, the Pentagon has invoked a sweeping “stop loss” order on all the active, National Guard and reserve troops deploying to the Middle East. The “stop loss” prohibits a soldier leaving the military if their term of enlistment expires during their tour-of-duty until 90 days after their unit comes back to the US sometime in 2005.

            Both the “stop loss” orders and the escalating use of the National Guard for overseas combat operations are a thinly disguised substitute for the draft. The 360,000 National Guardsmen are a particularly large and cheap source of cannon fodder for occupation duties. As they are part-time, the government is not responsible for their housing, health care or other maintenance costs after they come back from overseas and are de-mobilised. The wages of a National Guard soldier not on full-time duty are only 20 percent of active Army personnel. Even including the costs of the training the part-time soldiers undertake and the equipment they use, their annual cost to the Pentagon is less than 50 percent of full-time personnel.

            It is highly likely that a massive call-up of National Guard units not currently on duty is on the agenda later this year, possibly as many as 10 combat brigades. That will be the only way the US Army can sustain its deployments not only in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, South Korea and other locations around the globe, and have its active divisions free for new predatory wars.

            The logistical preconditions for another war will begin to take shape from as early as July. The rotation schedule means that by March the Army will have back in US bases the bulk of its rapid deployment force, the four division-plus XVIII Airborne Corps, which formed the backbone of the invasion of Iraq. The units will then be given four months to “reset” for use elsewhere. By September, the heavily-armored Fourth Infantry and First Armored Divisions will also have been “reset” after their Iraq deployment.

            Coinciding with the Army schedule, 11 of the US Navy’s 12 aircraft carrier strike groups are also currently out of service undergoing maintenance or post-maintenance training. All of them will be available for deployment by mid-2004.

            In the months leading up to the US presidential election, the White House will have both the fleet and 120,000 battle-experienced troops to attack the next target in the “war on terror”. The American soldiers occupying Iraq will be left to be killed and wounded to protect this earlier conquest, one suspects in ever-greater numbers.

Coalition casualties accounted for (Updated 22nd of January)
22.01.2004

12/01/04 (1 killed)

Staff Sgt. Ricky L. Crockett, 37. Killed Jan. 12 in Baghdad, Iraq. He was struck by an improvised explosive device while on a mounted patrol. (Company D, 51st Signal Battalion, XVIII Airborne Corps)

13/01/04

A U.S. Army AH-64 Apache attack helicopter was shot down near the western Iraqi town of Habbaniya. (3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment)

14/01/04 (1 killed)

Sgt. Keicia M. Hines, 27. Died on Jan. 14 when she was struck by a vehicle on Mosul Airfield in Mosul, Iraq. (108th Military Police, Combat Support Co.)

17/01/04 (3 killed)

A Bradley fighting vehicle detonated an IED causing the vehicle to catch fire. (4th Infantry Division)

Pfc. Cody J. Orr, 21. Killed when Bradley Fighting Vehicle struck an improvised explosive device (IED) and overturned Jan. 17, north of Taji, Iraq. Orr was one of three soldiers killed while conducting a surveillance sweep for IEDs north of Baghdad when the attack occurred. (2nd Battalion, 20th Field Artillery Regiment, 4th Infantry Division)

Spc. Larry E. Polley, Jr. Killed when Bradley Fighting Vehicle struck an improvised explosive device (IED) and overturned. Jan. 17, north of Taji, Iraq. Polley was one of three soldiers killed while conducting a surveillance sweep for IEDs north of Baghdad when the attack occurred. (2nd Battalion, 20th Field Artillery Regiment, 4th Infantry Division)

Sgt. Edmond L. Randle, 26. Killed when Bradley Fighting Vehicle struck an improvised explosive device (IED) and overturned. Jan. 17, north of Taji, Iraq. Randle was one of three soldiers killed while conducting a surveillance sweep for IEDs north of Baghdad when the attack occurred. (2nd Battalion, 20th Field Artillery Regiment, 4th Infantry Division)

LATEST UPDATES:

Names of three soldiers killed 17/01/04

BAGHDAD, Iraq – A Combined Joint Task Force-Seven soldier died from a non-hostile gunshot wound at approximately 6 p.m. Jan. 16 near Ad Diwaniyah. The soldier was evacuated to the Spanish Hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival.

The soldier’s name is being withheld pending next-of-kin notification.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – One Coalition Joint Task Force-Seven soldier died Jan. 18 of wounds received in an improvised explosive device attack in Samarra at approximately 2:30 p.m., Jan. 16. The incident is under investigation.

The soldier’s name is being withheld pending next of kin notification. 

LATEST UPDATES:

Name of soldier killed 16/01/04
Name of soldier killed 18/01/04 (Died of wounds received 16/01/04)

TIKRIT, Iraq - Two 4th Infantry Division soldiers were killed and one was critically wounded in a mortar attack on a forward operating base near Ba'qubah in the evening of Jan. 21. The wounded soldier was treated immediately and was evacuated to 21st Combat Support Hospital. The soldier is in critical but stable condition. Rockets were also used in the attack but caused no damage or casualties. Coalition forces identified from where the attack came and fired artillery shells and mortar rounds in response. There was no indication that the enemy sustained casualties as a result of the Coalition counterattack.

The soldiers' names are being withheld pending next-of-kin notification.

 Sources: Department of Defense (US), Ministry of Defence (UK), Centcom, CJTF-7, Haerens Operative Kommando (Denmark), Ministerio de Defensa (Spain), Ministerstwo Obrony Narodowej (Poland), Il Ministro della Difesa (Italia), Ministerstvo na Otbranata na Republika 

Three American troops, four Iraqi women killed in separate attacks

Al Bawaba,
22.01.2004

Three American troops were killed and one injured near Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, in a rocket or mortar attack at 6.30 pm (1530 GMT), the US military stated Thursday. "Three US soldiers were killed Wednesday and one wounded near Baquba in a mortar or rocket attack," Lieutenant Colonel Dan Williams told AFP.

Elsewhere, four Iraqi women were killed late Wednesday near Fallujah, a city west of Baghdad. The four were on their way to work in a nearby US base when the minibus they were travelling in was attacked by gunmen. Five other women were injured.

According to a survivor, the attack took place on the road linking Falluja to the US base of Habbaniya further west.

            Maggi Aziz, 49, wounded in the leg, shoulder and head, told AFP "four masked men in a white Opel machine-gunned our minibus and four women died. The rest of the passengers were wounded.

Mortar fire struck a U.S. military encampment in Iraq
22.01.2004

A barrage of mortar fire struck a U.S. military encampment in central Iraq, killing two American soldiers and critically wounding a third, the military said Thursday.

Also Thursday, gunmen firing from a van killed two Iraqi policemen and wounded three others in an attack on a checkpoint between Fallujah and Ramadi, and the 23-year-old son of a former senior official from Saddam Hussein's Baath party was slain by an unidentified attacker in the southern city of Basra, police said.

Maj. Josslyn Aberle, spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division, said insurgents fired mortars and rockets at a U.S. military encampment outside the town of Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, on Wednesday evening, killing the two soldiers and critically wounding another.

The three soldiers were standing outside the tactical operations center when the barrage hit, she said. The attack also damaged vehicles.

U.S. forces launched a counterattack but there was no indication the insurgents were hit, she said.

The two deaths raised to 505 the number of U.S. service members who have died since the U.S.-led coalition launched the Iraq war March 20.

The attack on the laundry workers took place Wednesday in Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, when the nine women were being driven to work, said Khajiq Serkis, the driver who was shot in the leg.

He told The Associated Press from his hospital bed that he was part of a three-car convoy being chased by the four attackers in a Opel sedan, their faces covered by scarves. Serkis said his minibus lagged behind and the gunmen shot the tires before firing indiscriminately at the occupants.

Four women were killed and the other five were injured in addition to Serkis, said police Col. Sabbar Fadhel.

Most of the women were dozing when the shooting started, said a survivor, Vera Ibrahim, 39.

All the victims, who were Armenian or Assyrian Christians, worked at a nearby U.S. military base in Habbaniyah. The women worked in the laundry and Serkis was employed as a mechanic and driver.

"If they were real men, they would have attacked men ... not poor women," said Seita Noubar, a sister of one of the victims, Sona Noubar, 50.

Former Baath party members and other Saddam loyalists are believed to be behind most of the guerrilla attacks against the U.S.-led coalition forces, often setting off car bombs and roadside explosives that have killed hundreds of Iraqi men and women.

In the city of Diwaniya, 120 miles south of Baghdad, Spanish Civil Guard commander Gonzalo Perez Garcia was shot in the head Thursday after a pre-dawn raid with Iraqi police at the home of a suspected terrorist leader, according to a Spanish Defense Ministry statement in Madrid. He was taken to a U.S. military hospital in Baghdad in a serious condition.

U.S. forces have struggled to bring peace to Iraq in time for the planned handover of power to a transitional Iraqi government on July 1.

The plan calls for selecting a legislature through caucuses in Iraq's 18 provinces in May, and that legislature then would appoint a provisional government to prepare for full elections in 2005. The plan has run into opposition from Iraq's top Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, whose demand for early elections has found wide support among Iraqis.

On Wednesday, Shiite leaders and coalition officials signaled flexibility on holding early elections, with both sides suggesting they will follow any U.N. recommendation, officials said.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said he is considering sending a team to Iraq to assess whether direct legislative elections can be held before the July 1 handover.

Britain, the staunchest ally of the United States, said Thursday that accelerating the timetable for elections in Iraq would be "difficult.”

AP

Iraqi death toll rises as insurgents target coalition employees
January 23, 2004
AFP

The toll of Iraqi deaths in 24 hours of guerrilla activity hit eight, as an insurgency fighting for its life after the capture of Saddam Hussein more and more sets its sights on Iraqis working for the US-led coalition.

Two US soldiers also died in the unrelenting violence.

Four Christian laundresses were killed and five others wounded Wednesday when assailants raked their minibus with gunfire as they were headed to work at a US base near Habbaniyah, west of Baghdad.

"We were nine women and the driver ... We were going, as every day, to the Habbaniyah base, where we work in the laundry," said Maggi Aziz, 49, wounded in the leg, shoulder and head.

"Suddenly, four masked men in a white Opel machine-gunned our minibus and four women died. The rest of the passengers were wounded," said the woman from her hospital bed in Ramadi.

The survivors suspected they were the latest prey of fighters looking to discredit the US occupation.

"It is possible that the attackers were terrorists who wanted to hit us because we have good relations with the Americans," said Suzanne Azat.

A doctor at the Ramadi hospital morgue said the four were killed by Kalashnikov fire, showing AFP one of the bullets retrieved from a body.

The women were employed by Balkans-based Ecolog, contracted by US firm Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of American energy conglomerate Halliburton that was formerly run by US Vice President Dick Cheney.

The US military later confirmed the death of three women in the area but gave no details.

In another attack, two Iraqi policemen were killed Thursday by assailants who ambushed a patrol north of the powderkeg town of Fallujah, police said. A civilian motorist who got caught in the blaze of gunfire was also killed and three policemen were wounded.

In the north, an Iraqi man was killed and three others wounded when a roadside bomb exploded 25 kilometres (16 miles) northwest of Iraq's oil capital of Kirkuk, local police said Thursday.

The bomb went off on the road to the city of Mosul in an area frequented by US patrols.

After a New Year's Eve car bombing of a packed Baghdad restaurant killed eight Iraqis, US military officials warned that the blast showed insurgents were now conducting large-scale attacks on civilians.

On Sunday, a suicide bombing outside the Baghdad headquarters of the coalition killed at least 24 people, most of them Iraqis queuing up to work at the symbol of American power in Iraq.

The two latest US casualties occurred near Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, in a mortar attack on their base Wednesday night, the military said, after earlier putting the toll at three. Another soldier was injured.

The deaths pushed to 234 the number of American soldiers killed in action since US President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.

But the violence was not confined to the so-called Sunni Triangle north and west of Baghdad where a hodgepodge of Saddam loyalists, Islamists and criminals have staged daily attacks on US forces.

In southern Iraq, a major in the paramilitary Spanish civil guard was shot in the forehead and seriously wounded in an "anti-terrorist operation" early Thursday, Spain's defence ministry said.

Major Gonzalo Perez Garcia, chief of security for the Spanish-Latin American Plus Ultra brigade in the coalition, was hit during a raid on a house at Hamsa, near the town of Diwaniyah. An Iraqi police officer was also hurt.

Ethnic tensions have also been apparent after Shiites protested for three days against US plans for transferring power in Iraq, as US and Iraqi leaders again snubbed their demand for general elections before a scheduled June handover.

Leading the Shiites has been Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a reclusive top cleric noted until now for his conservatism and aversion to politics.

For the coalition, the caucus process designed by it to select a transitional national assembly will wind up with a Shiite majority in any case.

But faced with street protests and threats of greater troubles ahead, the coalition is looking to steer a middle course between the Shiite giant awakening from its long slumber and the weaker Sunnis and Kurds.

Shiite demands are "worrying to the Kurds and Sunnis," a high-ranking coalition official said.

On Wednesday, Sunni religious leaders and Kurdish politicians rejected Shiite calls for early elections.

Army Reserve Chief Fears Retention Crisis
Helmly Faults Open-Ended Deployments, Shortages of Equipment in Iraq War
by Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
 January 21, 2004; Page A04

The head of the Army Reserve said yesterday that the 205,000-soldier force must guard against a potential crisis in its ability to retain troops, saying serious problems are being "masked" temporarily because reservists are barred from leaving the military while their units are mobilized in Iraq.

Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly said his staff is working on an overhaul of the reserve aimed in part at treating soldiers better and being more honest with them about how long they're likely to be deployed. Helmly said the reserve force bureaucracy bungled the mobilization of soldiers for the war in Iraq, and gave them a "pipe dream" instead of honest information about how long they might have to remain there.

"This is the first extended-duration war our nation has fought with an all-volunteer force," said Helmly. "We must be sensitive to that. And we must apply proactive, preventive measures to prevent a recruiting-retention crisis."

Helmly said his staff is engaged in an overhaul of the reserve aimed at turning the Army's part-time soldiers into a top-flight fighting force that can handle the strains of the global war on terrorism. In a Pentagon briefing for defense reporters, Helmly outlined an array of planned changes and bluntly described the force he took over in May 2002 as being dominated by bureaucrats who often ignored soldiers' needs.

In a recent memo, Helmly said, he told his subordinates that he was "really tired of going to see our reserve soldiers [and finding] they're short such simple things as goggles. It's about damn time you listen to your lawyers less and your conscience more. That will probably get me in trouble. But I told them, I want this stuff fixed."

Reservists in Iraq have long complained about having to spend a year there with inadequate equipment, including a lack of body armor.

Most reservists went to Iraq last year on year-long mobilizations, with a belief that they would be required to spend only six months in the country. But they were abruptly informed in September that they would have to spend 12 months in Iraq, pushing the total length of many reservists' mobilizations to 16 months or longer.

Analysts inside and outside the military say these long overseas mobilizations could have the effect of driving reservists out of the military in droves once they begin returning from Iraq over the next several months. After that, the service will lift the "stop-loss" provisions that prohibit soldiers from quitting the reserve when their hitches are up.

Helmly said he has not been surprised by such criticism. "The [Iraq] mobilization was so fraught with friction that it really put a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths," he said. "We had about 10,000 who had less than five days' notice that they were going to be mobilized. Then we had about 8,000 who were mobilized, got trained up, and never deployed."

"No sooner do the statues of Saddam Hussein start tumbling down, then the guidance was, start planning to demobilize everybody," Helmly said, only to find in July that a growing insurgency required remobilizing 4,000 to 5,000 of the 8,000 that were initially mobilized but never deployed.

"One lesson I have certainly learned . . . it is imperative that we communicate with our soldiers and their families in advance, and that we not set false expectations," Helmly said.

To that end, Helmly said, a "major order culture change" is taking place in the reserve so that reservists know, upon joining, that they will be called up to active duty for between nine and 12 months every four to five years.

As part of that change, he said, the current total of 2,091 reserve units will be reduced significantly so that every unit -- typically a support company of about 150 soldiers -- is manned, equipped and ready to go to war, if necessary.

Currently, 226,000 soldiers would be necessary to man all those units. But the Army Reserve is only authorized by Congress to have 205,000 soldiers, Helmly said, and at any given time, only between 160,000 and 175,000 of them are available for mobilization.

"We will in fact inactivate units beginning next year specifically to harvest the strength so we can man fully our remaining units," Helmly said, adding that maintenance and "water support" units will be reduced in favor of more military police, civil affairs and heavy truck transport detachments.

"I'm often asked by families, how do you know you'll be able to recruit for this force?" Helmly said. "There are no knowns; we're treading new virgin territory here. But most of our people will respond well to the initiatives we're putting forward. They don't wish to be part of a second-class team.”

At least 13 US military court martial hearings in Iraq since May 1
23.01.2004

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Adultery, assault, drunkenness, kidnapping, stealing computers, abusing prisoners and attempting to flee to Syria are some of the offenses US soldiers have been charged with in court martial cases since the Americans landed in Iraq.

At least 13 soldiers have gone up for court martial hearings in Iraq since May 1, the official end of major combat in the strife-torn country, according to an official army list obtained by AFP.

Seven have been handed bad conduct discharges, while the others have been sentenced to jail terms, ranging anywhere from between two and six months.

"It's a microcosm of society," said army lawyer Captain Jennifer Santiago about the excesses of military life nine months into the US occupation of Iraq.

Many other cases are still under investigation and are not at the stage where the top US commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, would recommend court martial proceedings, said Santiago, who serves at the coalition's command in Baghdad.

Last week, the US military announced an investigation into cases of abuse at an Iraqi detention centre, widely believed to be Baghdad's massive Abu Gharib prison.

That investigation is on top of a "handful" of inquiries into whether US soldiers have maltreated Iraqi detainees, Santiago said.

She would not specify how many, but said the overall number was small. The charges ranged from "withholding food" to "assault".

Santiago said most of the investigations and court martial proceedings were for solider-on-soldier offences related to "alcohol, sex, disrespect, disobedience and assault."

Since May, the US military in Iraq has discharged at least four soldiers and one non-commissioned officer for assault, according to the list given to AFP.

Three of the soldiers were involved in attacks on an officer or fellow enlisted man. But the military said it was unable to specify if the other two assault cases involved attacks on Iraqis or fellow soldiers.

In one of those cases, where the victim's identity was not revealed, the soldier was found guilty of "theft, assault and kidnapping." He was sentenced to 179 days in jail and expulsion from the military.

Santiago said the assault cases included the category of one soldier "locking and loading" his firearm at another.

Besides assault, some of the soldiers on the list were thrown out for theft, desertion and sexual high jinks.

In two separate cases, non-commissioned officers were sentenced to jail time, demoted and fined for stealing government laptops and trying to send them home by mail.

Two US non-commissioned officers were dealt bad conduct discharges for adultery, one of whom was also cited for "indecent acts", although Santiago said none of the court martial cases in Iraq involved prostitution.

She also said the greater number of court martial cases involved US army reservists.

Few reservists, long used to monthly training in America, imagined they would be pressed into active duty around the world after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States and have struggled to adapt.

Santiago said a backlog of cases still exist from the tail end of the US invasion of Iraq last spring, with some units waiting until they returned home to begin proceedings regarding allegations of impropriety.

"It's hard to do court martials" in the midst of a land invasion and then a nasty guerrilla insurgency, Santiago said.

One court martial case from the war involved "guys who were tried to steal a car and go to Syria," she said.

Eight Marines are also on trial in Camp Pendleton, California for the beating of Iraqi prisoners during the war.

Three army reservists from Pennsylvania were also dishonourably discharged in January for assaulting detainees in May at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq.

Santiago defended the efficacy of the system to discipline soldiers despite multiple allegations of excessive force against Iraqi prisoners by human rights groups.

"I think the oversight is good," she said.

But the US military is flexible in disciplining the soldier based on the person's history character and the circumstances involved, she said.

Depending on the offense, a captain or the battalion commander can hold a summary court session and jail a soldier for 30 days or even offer him counseling for a first offense, she said.

Serious charges would still make their way up the command as military units must file reports on their every activity.

While Santiago said the system was based on trust, she acknowledged that it could be exploited.

If a soldier stole money from an Iraqi he would try to hide the fact, but "99 percent of the time, there are layers and layers of people around who would report it," she said. 

Letters from Iraq
To: tbrnews
18 Jan 04

I hear you all will publish complaints from grunts. Well, here are a few. I am a reservist and I did not join the Reserves to go out of the country for a few years, eat rotten food, put up with stupid officers, shoot women and kids and beat the shit out of prisoners. I have a family at home who is not getting any money (my pay) from the govt and are now on Public Assistance. Anyone who bitches, and I mean anyone, gets gigged. Those who get convicted don’t get sent home…that would be too easy. They get mine detecting details which mostly means walking around in “suspect areas” until their legs get blown off. Two officers and a DOD civilian got fragged the other day. Two dead as shit and the other had one leg and a hand blown off. Really too bad! We here all know it was one of us that did it but no one is talking and I’ll bet none of this is on the news.

Modern 'Dreyfus Affair' is unworthy of America
Toronto  Sun
by Eric Margolis-- Contributing Foreign Editor
January 18, 2004

              Hatred of Muslims has become the anti-Semitism of our era. The latest example of this ugly fact is the vicious prosecution by the U.S. military of a Muslim army chaplain, Capt. James Yee.

               I call this disgraceful and shameful case America's Dreyfus Affair.

               In 1894, a French army officer, Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, who was Jewish, was wrongfully convicted of spying on the basis of forged documents. Though evidence pointed to another officer, anti-Semites in the French Army framed Dreyfus. He was given a life sentence on Devil's Island, a brutal, malarial penal colony in the Caribbean off French Guiana.

               Four years later, the great French writer Emile Zola published J'accuse (I accuse), his famous newspaper expose of the Dreyfus Affair in which he demolished the case against the persecuted officer and showed how hatred of Jews had led to this outrage.

               Fast forward to 2003. Capt. Yee, a native of New Jersey, West Point graduate, convert to Islam and one of the few Muslim chaplains in the U.S. armed forces, was arrested for espionage. Yee had been chaplain at the Bush administration's very own version of Devil's Island, the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp, ministering to the 660 Muslim prisoners held there in cages.

               Two Muslim-Americans working at Guantanamo as interpreters for the military, Ahmed Mehalba and Ahmad al-Halabi, were arrested on suspicions of passing information to Syria and possessing classified documents. U.S. Army Reserve officers at Guantanamo somehow believed they had uncovered a nefarious Syrian spy ring.

               Capt. Yee had once visited Syria for religious studies. He had dinner at Guantanamo with al-Halabi and Mehalba. So he, too, was arrested and charged with espionage - a capital offence. Spying charges have since been dropped against Halabi, but he and Mehalba still face other flimsy charges.

               Capt. Yee was charged with spying and thrown into solitary confinement in a naval prison for 2 1/2 months, where he was chained hand and foot. Jailers refused to tell him the direction in which Mecca lay so he could properly pray. He was denied family visits and repeatedly threatened with execution.

               Capt. Yee was finally released to face a court martial at Ft. Benning, Ga., which is ongoing.

               The military's case against him has steadily crumbled. Not a shred of evidence has emerged of spying or foreign contacts. After espionage charges were dropped, Yee was accused of the minor infraction of mishandling classified documents. But military prosecutors didn't even know which of the supposedly classified documents Yee had were actually classified. Most were apparently hand-written notes on his religious ministering.

Farce and a travesty

               The U.S. Army's former judge advocate general (the most senior military legal officer), John Fugh, called the Yee case "ridiculous" and said it should be speedily ended. Other legal experts and high-ranking officers term the trial a farce and a travesty of justice.

               But the military has continued with this preposterous show trial, unwilling to admit it was gravely mistaken in prosecuting Capt. Yee - just as the French Army refused to the bitter end to admit that Capt. Dreyfus was innocent. To cover the collapse of its ludicrous espionage case, the army then bizarrely charged Yee with, of all things, adultery and keeping pornography.

               So Yee, who is married, may have had an affair with a female officer. He may even have had a copy of Playboy, or used his computer to surf the smutnet.

               Adultery is an offence under the Uniform Military Code, but only a few officers have ever been prosecuted for this Victorian offence - otherwise a good part of the senior ranks of the armed forces would be in jail.

               Perhaps the military has forgotten that its former commander-in-chief, President Bill Clinton, violated this silly and unconstitutional regulation.

               As a former member of the U.S. Army, I know there is not much real justice in so-called military justice.

               It's up to the president and Congress to order the Pentagon generals who approved this sordid case to dismiss the charges against the American Dreyfus and present him with an enormous apology. If anyone belongs behind bars, it is the cretins who accused Yee of espionage. But as all soldiers know, the military always covers its backside.

               If Capt. Yee was any religion except Muslim, his prosecution – persecution is a more apt term - would have raised a public outcry. But the Bush administration's paranoia and relentless anti-Islamic fervour, and the growing hate campaign directed against Muslims by the president's fundamentalist Christian and neo-conservative allies, has legitimized persecution of Muslim-Americans, who now live in a state of fear that is beginning to resemble the growing terror felt by German Jews in the early 1930s.

               The Yee Affair is only one of a large number of cases in which Muslims have been charged by the government with non-existent or wildly exaggerated offences, then forced to admit guilt under threats of life sentences, or even execution.

Capt. Yee courageously refused to be intimidated into confessing to crimes he did not commit. His only serious offence, according to the evidence so far available, was being a caring chaplain in a Devil's Island created to terrify and punish Muslims.

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Eric can be reached by e-mail at margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com.
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@tor.sunpub.com