Choice America Editorial

A former US army general yesterday called for Donald Rumsfeld to resign on grounds of incompetence in Iraq, hours after Ayad Allawi, the former US-backed Iraqi prime minister, declared the country to be in the thick of a civil war that could soon "reach the point of no return".

Three years after Iraq was invaded, statistics published yesterday show that the frequency of insurgent bombings and group killings is growing, but both Mr Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, and George Bush have vowed to fight on.

"Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis," the defence secretary wrote in a Washington Post commentary, as the administration tried to quell growing concern that the conflict was unravelling beyond Washington's control.

President Bush made a brief appearance on the White House lawn to say he was "encouraged" by progress on forming a unity government in Iraq. But he had no other good news to mark three years of a war in which more than 2,300 Americans have died, and which has so far cost $500bn (nearly £290bn).

The US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, said that the troop withdrawals he had forecast for this spring or summer might have to wait until the end of the year or even 2007. And Paul Eaton, a former American army general in charge of training Iraqi forces until 2004, marked the anniversary with a furious attack on Mr Rumsfeld, saying he was "not competent to lead our armed forces".

In London, Mr Allawi told BBC 2's Sunday AM programme: "We are losing each day, as an average, 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."

Britain's defence secretary, John Reid, rejected that assessment. In Baghdad's green zone, he said that most of Iraq was under control: "There is not civil war now, nor is it inevitable, nor is it imminent".

In Washington, the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, also appeared on television to play down ideas of civil war. He told the CBS programme Face the Nation that the surge in attacks aimed at fomenting sectarian conflict simply reflected the insurgents' "state of desperation".

The remark echoed a similarly optimistic phrase used by Mr Cheney in March last year, when he claimed the insurgency was in its "last throes". Yesterday, he maintained that that description was still "basically accurate".

There were signs yesterday that the Bush administration was losing its ability to shape perception of the conflict, even among partisan Republicans. George Will, an influential conservative commentator, yesterday compared Iraq's war to that of the 1930s Spanish civil war.

Mr Allawi now heads a list of secular parties that had hoped to broker a compromise between the Shia and Sunni parties. He warned that if Iraq reached the point of no return it would "not only fall apart, but sectarianism would spread through the region". He said even Europe and the US would "not be spared all the violence" linked to sectarian problems.

There were no public gatherings in Baghdad yesterday. People continued to race to work and back home, fearing explosions, kidnapping or murder.

Iraqi police reported that US troops had killed eight people, after a patrol was ambushed in the Sunni town of Duluiya, north of Baghdad, early yesterday. The victims included a 13-year-old boy and his parents, who were shot dead.

According to figures compiled by the Brookings Institution, in Washington, there were 75 attacks a day last month, compared with 54 on average a year earlier. The number of Iraqi civilians being killed in the conflict rose to 1,000 in February, from 750 in February 2005. There are now 232,000 Iraqi security personnel, up 90,000 over the past 12 months, but their ability to control the situation is a matter of dispute. Oil production, the mainstay of the economy, is in decline.

The Islamist parties have failed to agree on a national unity government and sectarian violence has markedly increased.

Last July Gen Casey predicted that if the political process went well there could be "fairly substantial reductions" in US troops in Iraq this spring or summer.

Yesterday, calling on the US to keep its nerve, Mr Rumsfeld pointed to the swelling ranks of Iraqi government forces. But Mr Eaton, a former major general, said the defence secretary had "shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically", and was "far more than anyone else, responsible for what has happened to our important mission in Iraq". Mr Rumsfeld had to step down, he said.

Backstory

Since the invasion of Iraq three years ago, the US military has lost more than 2,300 troops in combat, roadside explosions, insurgent attacks and friendly fire. But that figure is dwarfed by estimates for the number of Iraqis killed, which range from a conservative 30,000 to 100,000, according to a Lancet report in November 2004. As many as 50 people are killed every day. Britain has lost 103 soldiers in Iraq, while other nations together have lost 94 troops. But the cost of war has not just been measured in human terms. There is the financial cost. The US is still spending $6bn (£3.5bn) a month in Iraq, primarily on the 130,000 troops it still maintains in the country.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

The average American understands that soldiers who fought in Vietnam were unfairly blamed for a war they did not start, for lies they did not tell, for mismanaged battle plans they could not salvage. So we're determined not to make that mistake again. This time around, most of us salute our soldiers.

Even determined peace activists, for the most part, are committed to two things - ending American involvement in Iraq and honoring the soldiers who volunteered to serve there. In a bitterly divided country, the vast majority of us agree that rank-and-file troops should not be held accountable for the politics that led to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Ironically, there is something else most of us agree on, whether in red states or blue: We don't want our loved ones to go to war.

Three years ago, when the invasion of Iraq was still widely supported in the United States, the prospect of a military draft was not. Whether Democrats, Republicans or independents, most Americans - especially among the affluent classes - were virulently opposed to the idea that their sons and daughters might be forced to serve the nation's military. We still are.

The politics of discussing a draft became this weird during the last election cycle: Conservatives savaged anybody who suggested the possibility of military conscription as a whiny appeaser who really wanted to end the war. OK. Let's unravel that.

If it is a given that a draft would have been so unpopular that it would have ended support for the war in Iraq, what does that say? Doesn't it suggest that many of those who so easily supported this war in the beginning did so because it didn't affect them or their families?

Military recruits are pulled largely from the nation's working class - from those whose economic prospects are less than stellar, from high school graduates who know they have little chance of affording college tuition, from young parents whose civilian jobs don't come with health insurance. Enlisted men and women tend to come from households earning $32,000 to $33,500, according to a 1999 Defense Department study. (The median American income is $43,300.) This is not a truth the middle class is eager to confront.

Ah, but they volunteered, you say. Yes, they did. All the more reason to honor their commitment by making sure they aren't cannon fodder in a dubious cause. They took to heart the common platitudes and easy slogans about duty and honor and service while many who are wealthier did not. Soldiers shouldn't be ill-used simply because they believed in their country and its leaders.

And they have been ill-used. They were sent to fight on a false pretext - that Mr. Hussein was linked to 9/11 - by civilian leaders who refused to plan for anything but quick and certain victory.

Of course, combat veterans were rare among the armchair hawks in Congress and the White House who rallied the nation for war. Vice President Dick Cheney has said he had "other priorities" during the war in Vietnam. And President Bush ... well, that story is well known. Even if you credit him with conscientiousness and brilliance as a National Guard pilot, he never left the United States.

Their callousness about other people's children aside, it's not just Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush whom I hold responsible for the deaths of more than 2,300 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. It's also men such as Sen. John Kerry and former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Vietnam veterans who had seen young men die in combat. They knew better than to take the nation to war on the wings of a lie.

That they did was not only unjust, it was immoral.

Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

© 2006 The Baltimore Sun

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

An SAS soldier has refused to fight in Iraq and has left the Army over the "illegal" tactics of United States troops and the policies of coalition forces.

After three months in Baghdad, Ben Griffin told his commander that he was no longer prepared to fight alongside American forces.

He said he had witnessed "dozens of illegal acts" by US troops, claiming they viewed all Iraqis as "untermenschen" - the Nazi term for races regarded as sub-human.

The decision marks the first time an SAS soldier has refused to go into combat and quit the Army on moral grounds.

It immediately brought to an end Mr Griffin's exemplary, eight-year career in which he also served with the Parachute Regiment, taking part in operations in Northern Ireland, Macedonia and Afghanistan.

But it will also embarrass the Government and have a potentially profound impact on cases of other soldiers who have refused to fight.

On Wednesday, the pre-trial hearing will begin into the court martial of Flt Lt Malcolm Kendall-Smith, a Royal Air Force doctor who has refused to return to Iraq for a third tour of duty on the grounds that the war is illegal. Mr Griffin's allegations came as the Foreign Office minister Kim Howells, visiting Basra yesterday, admitted that Iraq was now "a mess".

Mr Griffin, 28, who spent two years with the SAS, said the American military's "gung-ho and trigger happy mentality" and tactics had completely undermined any chance of winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi population. He added that many innocent civilians were arrested in night-time raids and interrogated by American soldiers, imprisoned in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, or handed over to the Iraqi authorities and "most probably" tortured.

Mr Griffin eventually told SAS commanders at Hereford that he could not take part in a war which he regarded as "illegal".

He added that he now believed that the Prime Minister and the Government had repeatedly "lied" over the war's conduct.

"I did not join the British Army to conduct American foreign policy," he said. He expected to be labelled a coward and to face a court martial and imprisonment after making what "the most difficult decision of my life" last March.

Instead, he was discharged with a testimonial describing him as a "balanced, honest, loyal and determined individual who possesses the strength of character to have the courage of his convictions".

Last night Patrick Mercer, the shadow minister for homeland security, said: "Trooper Griffin is a highly experienced soldier. This makes his decision particularly disturbing and his views and opinions must be listened to by the Government."

The MoD declined to comment.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

My, my. So many offenses to choose from, so little space in which to write about them.

It's as though George Bush is having a fine game of darts, playing on a board in which each section is the bull's-eye. Only problem is, each bull's-eye is yet another puncture in our democracy, yet another wound for ordinary Americans to bleed from.

Take the dart he's thrown at our nation's veterans these past few days - men and women who are accustomed to bleeding for America, to be sure.

Contrary to accusations in some of our letters to the editor that I'm "against veterans," I rather like veterans. I got to know a few of them, growing up as I did with a father who lost a leg at the Battle of the Bulge. There were many visits to the VA hospital's wooden leg room for fittings when I was growing up.

I never met my Uncle Joe, of course. He died before I was born. In fact, he was the first soldier from Washingtonville to give his life in World War II.

When I was marching in Memorial Day parades, first as a Girl Scout and later as a musician in the high school band, the marchers always stopped at my Uncle Joe's grave site in St. Mary's Catholic cemetery. It was there that the military men shot off their guns in a salute to our war dead.

He's forgotten by most these days, the honor now going to those lying in fresher graves.

My Uncle Tony bobbed in the Pacific for 20 hours awaiting rescue after his plane went down returning from a bombing mission. My Uncle Alex, the sole support of his younger siblings, served in the Pacific, too.

And a dozen of my classmates either died in Vietnam or came back severely wounded or partly crazy.

So I'm not "against veterans." Opposing Bush's insane war in Iraq should not be confused with opposing the soldiers he sends there. I have nothing but respect for them - and anger on their behalf.

Why the anger? Because even as Bush so cynically places them in harm's way, he's busy gutting the VA budget back home. He intends to drop the soldiers of this war like a hot potato when all is said and done.

The Bush budget would cut billions from the VA beginning in 2008 - numbers so preposterous that it seems like he must be making them up. Veterans groups say the only way Bush's numbers work is to either throw hundreds of thousands of vets out of the system or redefine who is a veteran.

Meanwhile, the need for VA services is only rising. As of Wednesday, 16,742 American soldiers have been wounded in Iraq. These are not folks who got their little toe blown off. Many of them have suffered grievous injuries because our medical technology is keeping alive those who would have died in former wars - alive but permanently damaged from head injuries, loss of all their limbs, blindness and the rest of the lovely consequences of Bush's war.

The VA system is already running out of beds for them. Last year, the inpatient count at veterans hospitals was 54 percent higher than in 2001.

And let's not forget the mental problems. More than a third of our soldiers are returning from Iraq in need of counseling, according to the Pentagon. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Two sessions with a shrink won't make that horror go away.

So, yeah, I'm angry on their behalf. And I know my father would be livid if he were alive to see this mess.

My father was a veteran, and he was proud to serve. He never minded too much about the leg. But then, his was a war - and a president - he could believe in.

Good news! Reader Mike Palkovic has pointed out that my countdown to Inauguration Day 2009 has been off by five days. There are fewer days than we thought! I've made the adjustment. There are now 1,051 days 'til Inauguration 2009. I say we have a drink together when we hit triple digits.

Beth Quinn's column appears on Monday in the Times-Herald Record (New York)

© 2006 Times-Herald Record

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK