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"Mission Accomplished," 5 Years Later
Since Bush Declared End To Major Combat Operations In Iraq, Nearly 4,000 U.S. Troops Have Died

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May 1, 2008
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"In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country," President George W. Bush told the crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln May 1, 2003. (AP)

The White House now avoids using the word "mission" when referring to the war in Iraq. Bill Plante reports on what has become an embarrassment to the Bush administration. | Share/Embed

* The White House now avoids using the word "mission" when referring to the war in Iraq. Bill Plante reports on what has become an embarrassment to the Bush administration.
Iraq: From 'Mission' To 'Job' (1:52)
* Allen Pizzey and Jim Axelrod report on the anniversary of President Bush\'s infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech on Iraq and how the country is holding together three years later.
Mission Still Not Accomplished (1:42)
* A year ago, President Bush stood on an aircraft carrier and proclaimed major combat in Iraq over. Since then, 607 U.S. troops have died, and the future of Iraq seems unclear, Jim Acosta reports.
Mission Not Accomplished (1:54)

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Iraq: 5 Years At War
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Iraq: 5 Years At War

Five years after the U.S.-led invasion, the war wears on.

(CBS/AP) It was a picture-perfect moment, made for the TV cameras, in which a military leader stood before heroes and heroines to declare a victory which seemed to come easier than anyone dared hope, in a conflict which was opposed by many friends and foes alike.

May 1 marks the fifth anniversary of President George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln.

After shifting explanations, the White House eventually said the "Mission Accomplished" phrase referred to the carrier's crew completing their 10-month mission, not the military completing its mission in Iraq.

"President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said 'mission accomplished' for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission," White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday. "And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year."

After being landed on the deck of the carrier in an S-3B Viking 30 miles off the coast San Diego (Ari Fleischer said the president "could have helicoptered," but "he wanted to see a landing the way aviators see a landing"), Mr. Bush appeared in a flight suit to the cheers of the ship's personnel and the glare of television lights.

Later, he stood at a podium against a backdrop of an enormous banner reading "Mission Accomplished."

To the assembled audience and the world, Mr. Bush said, "Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.

"In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty, and for the peace of the world. Our nation and our coalition are proud of this accomplishment - yet it is you, the members of the United States military, who achieved it. Your courage - your willingness to face danger for your country and for each other - made this day possible. Because of you, our nation is more secure. Because of you, the tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free.

"Tonight, I have a special word for Secretary Rumsfeld, for General Franks, and for all the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States: America is grateful for a job well done."

The president himself never said "mission accomplished," but that often gets lost in the feelings over the continuing war, reports CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante.

Five years after that speech, after the meaning of the phrase "mission accomplished" and when is a job truly "done" has been endlessly parsed, and after responsibility for creating and hanging the sign was first denied and later accepted, the White House said Wednesday that President Bush has paid a price for the banner, with its affirmative message becoming a target of mockery and a symbol of U.S. misjudgments and mistakes in the long and costly war - a war in which major combat operations are still being waged.

While the White House distanced itself from the message soon after the event, Mr. Bush was not averse to repeating it. Speaking to troops in Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar the following month, Mr. Bush said, "America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and that mission has been accomplished."

"President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific."
-White House press secretary Dana Perino

Now in its sixth year, the war in Iraq has claimed the lives of at least 4,058 members of the U.S. military - 3,924 of whom have died since Mr. Bush landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed (the true number may never be known, since the Iraqi government does not record tallies of the dead), and millions have been displaced from their homes. And there are currently more U.S. troops in Iraq than there were when the U.S. invaded with a contingent of other coalition forces.

There were intimations within Mr. Bush's speech, not excerpted and repeated as often, that the administration knew it was not about to wash its hands of Iraq any time soon. "The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort," Mr. Bush said. "Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq."

Mr. Bush, in a speech early this month, repeated the hopeful sentiment stated that day, that "while this war is difficult, it is not endless."

That message may have special meaning for the crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln, on which their commander-in-chief declared "Mission Accomplished" five long years ago. Their ship has just begun duty in the Persian Gulf, within striking distance of the coast of Iran.

The aircraft-carrier address looks almost sane by comparison:>>>----->

Originally Posted by Sen. John McC>A>R>R>H>A>E>-(R)eality challenged AZ

“I don’t believe it’s going to be nearly the size and scope that it was in 1991.” 9.15.02

“We made serious mistakes right after the initial successes by not having enough troops there on the ground.” 9.20.04

“This conflict is going to be relatively short.” 3.23.02

“I’ve always said this is long and hard and tough.” 4.6.08

“There’s no doubt in my mind that once these people are gone that we will be welcomed as liberators.” 3.24.03

“It’s clear that the end is very much in sight.” 4.9.03

“There’s not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias. So I think they can probably get along.” 4.23.03

“Democrats are trying to do some kind of attack against this magnificent victory.” 7.23.03

“I would argue that the next three to six months will be critical.” 9.10.03

“Only the most deluded of us could doubt the necessity of this war.” 8.04

“We’ve seen a number of signs of progress, including that of the capabilities of the Iraqi military, agreement with the Sunnis as framing the constitution, a decrease in suicide bombers from Iraqis and more and more coming in from the outside. … there is a legitimacy to the Iraqi government that, frankly, the government of South Vietnam never had.” 6.28.05

“We will probably see significant progress in the next six months to a year.” 12.4.05

“We are making progress. The formation of a government is helpful. We are training the Iraqi troops. There are parts of Iraq that are well under control and very peaceful.” 5.24.06

“Things are better and there are encouraging signs. I have been here many years—many times over the years. Never have I been able to drive from the airport, never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today.” 4.1.07, wearing body armor, accompanied by 100 U.S. soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships

“The next six months are going to be critical.” 9.12.07

“Iraq is now the central front in the war against al-Qaeda.” 9.16.07

“Anybody who believes the surge has not succeeded, militarily, politically, and in most other ways, frankly, does not know the facts on the ground.” 2.08

“We’ve go to get American’s off the frontlines, have the Iraqis as part of the strategy, take over more and more of the responsibilities, and then I don’t think Americans are concerned if we’re there for one hundred years or a thousand years or ten thousand years.” 1.6.08

“If we do set a date for withdrawal, Al Qaida will then win. … We’re all over the world. One of the obligations, unfortunately, of being a great superpower is that we have to take care of the world’s security.” 2.3.08

>>>----->

http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti...te-cnn-partner

How Much Did Rumsfeld Know?
Thursday, May. 01, 2008

Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. Forces in Iraq in 2003-2004, has written a new memoir, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story, an account of his life and his service in Iraq. Sanchez was a three-star general — and the military's senior Hispanic officer — when he led U.S. forces in the first year of the war. He was relieved of his command by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2004 following the revelations of the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. In 2005, Marine General Peter Pace, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called him to say his career was over and he wouldn't get the promotion to a full general — four stars — that Sanchez says he was promised. Six months later, at Rumsfeld's request, he showed up at the Pentagon for a meeting with the defense secretary shortly before retiring. In this exclusive excerpt, Sanchez details what happened next:

I walked into Rumsfeld's office at 1:25 p.m. on April 19, 2006. He had just returned from a meeting at the White House, and the only other person present in the room was his new Chief of Staff, John Rangel.

"Ric, it's been a long time," Rumsfeld said, greeting me in a friendly manner. "I'm really sorry that your promotion didn't work out. We just couldn't make it work politically. Sending a nomination to the Senate would not be good for you, the Army, or the department."

"I understand, sir," I replied.

Then we walked over to his small conference table. "Have a seat," he said. "Now, Ric, what are your timelines?"

"Well, sir, my transition leave will start in September with retirement the first week of November."

"That's a long time. Why so long?"

"I want to have my son graduate from high school in June. After that, I'll have forty-five days to hit my three years' time in grade, so I can retire as a three-star without a waiver."

"Oh, yes, I remember now. That's why we kept you in Germany in your current job."

"Right."

"Ric, I wanted to tell you that I'm interested in giving you some options for follow-on employment as a civilian in the Department of Defense." Rumsfeld then talked about a possibility with either the Africa Center for Strategic Studies and the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies. There was a director they were thinking of moving to make room for me, he explained.

"Well, I'll consider that, sir, but I'm not making any commitments. I have some other opportunities I need to explore."

Secretary Rumsfeld then pulled out a two-page memo and handed it to me. "I wrote this after a promotion interview about two weeks ago," he explained. "The officer told me that one of the biggest mistakes we made after the war was to allow CENTCOM and CFLCC to leave the Iraq theater immediately after the fighting stopped — and that left you and V Corps with the entire mission."

"Yes, that's right," I said.

"Well, how could we have done that?" he said in an agitated, but adamant, tone. "I knew nothing about it. Now, I'd like you to read this memo and give me any corrections."

In the memo, Rumsfeld stated that one of the biggest strategic mistakes of the war was ordering the major redeployment of forces and allowing the departure of the CENTCOM and CFLCC staffs in May�June 2003.

"This left General Sanchez in charge of operations in Iraq with a staff that had been focused at the operational and tactical level, but was not trained to operate at the strategic/operational level." He went on to write that neither he nor anyone higher in the administration knew these orders had been issued, and that he was dumbfounded when he learned that Gen McKiernan was out of the country and in Kuwait, and that the forces would be drawn down to a level of about 30,000 by September. "I did not know that Sanchez was in charge," he wrote.

I stopped reading after I read that last statement, because I knew it was total BS. After a deep breath, I said, "Well, Mr. Secretary, the problem as you've stated it is generally accurate, but your memo does not accurately capture the magnitude of the problem. Furthermore, I just can't believe you didn't know that Franks's and McKiernan's staffs had pulled out and that the orders had been issued to redeploy the forces."

At that point, Rumsfeld became very excited, jumped out of his seat, and sat down in the chair next to me so that he could look at the memo with me. "Now just what is it in this memorandum that you don't agree with?" he said, almost shouting.

"Mr. Secretary, when V Corps ramped up for the war, our entire focus was at the tactical level. The staff had neither the experience nor training to operate at the strategic level, much less as a joint/combined headquarters. All of CFLCC's generals, whom we called the Dream Team, left the country in a mass exodus. The transfer of authority was totally inadequate, because CENTCOM's focus was only on departing the theater and handing off the mission. There was no focus on postconflict operations. None! In their minds, the war was over and they were leaving. Everybody was executing these orders, and the services knew all about it."

Starting to get a little worked up, I paused a moment, and then looked Rumsfeld straight in the eye. "Sir, I cannot believe that you didn't know I was being left in charge in Iraq."

"No! No!" he replied. "I was never told that the plan was for V Corps to assume the entire mission. I have to issue orders and approve force deployments into the theater, and they moved all these troops around without any orders or notification from me."

"Sir, I don't . . . "

"Why didn't you tell anyone about this?" he asked, interrupting me in an angry tone.

"Mr. Secretary, all of the senior leadership in the Pentagon knew what was happening. Franks issued the orders and McKiernan was executing them."

"Well, what about Abizaid? He was the deputy then."

"Sir, General Abizaid knew and worked very hard with me to reverse direction once he assumed command of CENTCOM. General Bell also knew, and he offered to send me his operations officer. In early July, when General Keane visited us, I described to him the wholly inadequate manning level of the staff, and told him that we were set up for failure. He agreed and told me that he would immediately begin to identify general officers to help fill our gaps."

"Yes, yes," replied Rumsfeld. "General Keane is a good man. But this was a major failure and it has to be documented so that we never do it again." He then explained that he would be tasking Adm. Ed Giambastiani, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to conduct an inquiry on this issue.

"Well, I think that's appropriate," I said. "That way you'll all be able to understand what was happening on the ground."

"By the way," said Rumsfeld, "why wasn't this in the lessons-learned packages that have been forwarded to my level."

"Sir, I cannot answer that question," I replied. "But this was well known by leadership at multiple levels."

After the meeting ended, I remember walking out of the Pentagon shaking my head and wondering how in the world Rumsfeld could have expected me to believe him. Everybody knew that CENTCOM had issued orders to drawdown the forces. The Department of Defense had printed public affairs guidance for how the military should answer press queries about the redeployment. There were victory parades being planned. And in mid-May 2003, Rumsfeld himself had sent out some of his famous "snowflake" memorandums to Gen. Franks asking how the general was going to redeploy all the forces in Kuwait. The Secretary knew. Everybody knew.

So what was Rumsfeld doing? Nineteen months earlier, in September 2004, when it was clearly established in the Fay-Jones report that CJTF-7 was never adequately manned, he called me in from Europe and claimed ignorance, "I didn't know about it," he said. "How could this happen? Why didn't you tell somebody about it?"

Now, he had done exactly the same thing, only this time he had prepared a written memorandum documenting his denials. So it was clearly a pattern on the Secretary's part, and now I recognized it. Bring in the top-level leaders. Profess total ignorance. Ask why he had not been informed. Try to establish that others were screwing things up. Have witnesses in the room to verify his denials. Put it in writing. In essence, Rumsfeld was covering his rear. He was setting up his chain of denials should his actions ever be questioned. And worse yet, in my mind, he was attempting to level all the blame on his generals

But why now? Why was he doing it in September 2006? I wasn't completely sure. I knew it had been a hectic week. The media was hounding Rumsfeld, because a number of former generals had staged something of a revolt and were calling for his resignation. Perhaps he wanted to set up this link in his chain of denials before I left the service, or gauge how I was going to react to his position. Or Rumsfeld might have been anticipating a big political shift in Congress after the midterm November elections, which, in turn, might lead to Democratic-controlled hearings. I didn't know exactly why it happened at this particular time. I just know that it did happen.

Upon returning to Germany, I had some very long discussions with my wife, especially about Rumsfeld's offer of a possible high-paying job in the Department of Defense. "I'm not sure I want to pursue something like that," I said. "But given my reaction to Rumsfeld's memorandum, he now knows that I'm not going to play along. So I don't think he'll pursue it."

"Ricardo, they are just trying to buy you off and keep you silent," said Maria Elena. "I don't think we should mess with them anymore."

My wife had hit the nail right on the head. "I believe you're right," I replied. And sure enough, no one from the Department of Defense ever followed up. So at that point, I closed out all options of doing anything with DoD after retirement.

On my first day back in the office, I received a phone call from Adm. Giambastiani, who had obviously talked to Rumsfeld. "Ric, what happened in that meeting?" he asked. "The Secretary was really upset."

"Well, sir, I essentially told him that his memorandum was wrong," I said. "I guess he didn't like that."

"Well, no, I guess he didn't. Anyway, he's asked me to make this study happen, so we'll get right on it."

Giambastiani assigned the task to the Joint Warfighting Center and gave them a pretty tight timeline. So it wasn't long before I was giving the investigative team a complete rundown of everything that had happened in Iraq between May and June 2003. I later learned that Gen. Tommy Franks, however, had refused to speak with them.

A few months later, I was making a presentation at the Joint Warfighting Center and ran across several of the people involved with the study. "Say, did you guys ever complete that investigation?" I asked.

"Oh, yes sir. We sure did," came the reply. "And let me tell you, it was ugly."

"Ugly?" I asked.

"Yes, sir. Our report validated everything you told us — that Franks issued the orders to discard the original twelve-to-eighteen-month occupation deployment, that the forces were drawing down, that we were walking away from the mission, and that everybody knew about it. And let me tell you, the Secretary did not like that one bit. After we went in to brief him, he just shut us down. 'This is not going anywhere,' he said. 'Oh, and by the way, leave all the copies right here and don't talk to anybody about it.'"

"You mean he embargoed all the copies of the report?" I asked.

"Yes, sir, he did."

From that, my belief was that Rumsfeld's intent appeared to be to minimize and control further exposure within the Pentagon and to specifically keep this information from the American public.

Continuing the conversation, I inquired about the "original twelve-to-eighteen-month occupation deployment," because I wasn't sure what he was talking about. It turned out that the investigative team was so thorough, they had actually gone back and looked at the original operational concept that had been prepared by CENTCOM (led by Gen. Franks) before the invasion of Iraq was launched. It was standard procedure to present such a plan, which included such things as: timing for predeployment, deployment, staging for major combat operations, and postdeployment. The concept was briefed up to the highest levels of the U.S. government, including the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council, and the President of the United States.

And the investigators were now telling me that the plan called for a Phase IV (after combat action) operation that would last twelve to eighteen months.

To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I had never seen any approved CENTCOM campaign plan, either conceptual or detailed, for the post�major combat operations phase. When I was on the ground in Iraq and saw what was going on, I assumed they had done zero Phase IV planning. Now, three years later, I was learning for the first time that my assumption was not completely accurate. In fact, CENTCOM had originally called for twelve to eighteen months of Phase IV activity with active troop deployments. But then CENTCOM had completely walked away by simply stating that the war was over and Phase IV was not their job.

That decision set up the United States for a failed first year in Iraq. There is no question about it. And I was supposed to believe that neither the Secretary of Defense nor anybody above him knew anything about it? Impossible! Rumsfeld knew about it. Everybody on the NSC knew about it, including Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, and Colin Powell. Vice President Cheney knew about it. And President Bush knew about it.

There's not a doubt in my mind that they all embraced this decision to some degree. And if it had not been for the moral courage of Gen. John Abizaid to stand up to them all and reverse Franks's troop drawdown order, there's no telling how much more damage would have been done.

In the meantime, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily wounded, maimed, and killed as a result. In my mind, this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty.
From the book Wiser in Battle. Copyright � 2008 by Ricardo S. Sanchez. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Come on out and play, cowards. Stuff like this is going to keep hitting you over the head for the next generation.

Originally Posted by Pink Splice

... Stuff like this is going to keep hitting you over the head for the next generation.

We may need to clean house by holding a real investigation under the new administration, and do it in public. A joint Congressional investigative committee would be best. I know it's considered bad politics, but this may be an exception ... much like Watergate.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

We may need to clean house by holding a real investigation under the new administration, and do it in public. A joint Congressional investigative committee would be best. I know it's considered bad politics, but this may be an exception ... much like Watergate.

It may be gone over in ten years time if a Coming Crisis Congress w/ cojones is ever returned by the exercise of the franchise.

Too many of the present worthies have their fingerprints on the Present Progress in Eurasia and will continue to kick the can of that Reform down the dusty alleyways of Irak, Helmand, et. al, for the near term:>>>----->

Originally Posted by Mr. Alan Bock

There is no candidate with a chance at the presidency who questions the fundamental underpinnings of the policy of maintaining dozens of forward military positions in the world at large. None {styled 'commies' by my fellow Minnesotan} is proposing to withdraw from Japan, South Korea or Germany – let alone Kazakhstan or other central Asian countries that might or might not turn out to have tappable energy resources – despite the general uselessness and ongoing irritant and expense such deployments represent. No candidate has a vision of U.S. foreign policy that moves beyond empire to a position closer to something like continental self-defense and war avoidance, let alone reducing the U.S. footprint in the world at large.


Too bad. I suspect more Americans than candidates or conventional thinkers realize would welcome more fundamental rethinking of U.S. foreign policy.

Pea Podism in yet another 3T election.

Originally Posted by Pink Splice

Come on out and play, cowards. Stuff like this is going to keep hitting you over the head for the next generation.

garsh, guy. you win already. give it a rest.

Originally Posted by the bouncer

garsh, guy. you win already. give it a rest.

Not until I make them go through being formally drummed out, tied to a caisson, whipped to a millimeter of their lives, and kicked out the back gate.

Somebody admitted I was right. Frakking finally. Huzzah! I SUCK!

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

We may need to clean house by holding a real investigation under the new administration, and do it in public. A joint Congressional investigative committee would be best. I know it's considered bad politics, but this may be an exception ... much like Watergate.

The sooner the better.

Originally Posted by Zarathustra

The sooner the better.

March 2009, at the earliest. March 2012, if not.

Originally Posted by Pink Splice

March 2009, at the earliest. March 2012, if not.

Can you imagine the stories that are going to come out of all of this? What we already know is outlandish. Can you imagine what we don't know? When the full impact is appreciated, it will blow Watergate out of the . . . er, . . . water.

BTW, Wally, I read an article somewhere today that said thousands of souls from the Navy and Air Force are being used right now on the ground in Iraq to butress the Army and Marines. You saw that coming.

The whole US and allied enterprise since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has been a failure. The US should have used the regular Iraqi army to help stablise the country and gradually reduce US and allied troop committments.

The US and allied interests are to fight Islamic Jihadi's everywhere, including regime of the Mullah's in Iran. Saddam Hussein was a type of man quite willing to deal with Islamists when it suited him.

It is going to take someone with a lot of political courage to say the Iraq enterprise has been a failure so far and make a dignified exit.

I would say the very likely effect of an withdrawal from Iraq would be that the Kurds and Shia would make an alliance and turn on the Sunnis who have opressed them, the whole sunni population of Iraq would be driven into Syria and Jordan. Although it would wipe out the Sunni Jihdai's, although the Shia Jihadi's would be much embolded.

I'm just waiting for someone to offer up the argument that the lives of the 4,000 U.S. troops that have been lost in Iraq have effectively "bought" the lives of 40,000 - or maybe even 400,000 - civilians on the home front, who have not been the victims of another 9/11 attack, or attacks.

Wasn't the same rationale advanced to justify the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - that is to say, that the A-bombs killed thousands, but saved millions?

Originally Posted by Tristan

The whole US and allied enterprise since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has been a failure. The US should have used the regular Iraqi army to help stablise the country and gradually reduce US and allied troop committments.

The US and allied interests are to fight Islamic Jihadi's everywhere, including regime of the Mullah's in Iran. Saddam Hussein was a type of man quite willing to deal with Islamists when it suited him.

It is going to take someone with a lot of political courage to say the Iraq enterprise has been a failure so far and make a dignified exit.

I would say the very likely effect of an withdrawal from Iraq would be that the Kurds and Shia would make an alliance and turn on the Sunnis who have opressed them, the whole sunni population of Iraq would be driven into Syria and Jordan. Although it would wipe out the Sunni Jihdai's, although the Shia Jihadi's would be much embolded.

Do your people still wish to reform the landmass to your North and West in the Romantic Idealist manner you yourself did once embrace?

Will Australia have a "who lost Eurasia" backlash in its political campaigns? And where was EnZed in this campaign? Do advise.

Originally Posted by Anthony '58 II

I'm just waiting for someone to offer up the argument that the lives of the 4,000 U.S. troops that have been lost in Iraq have effectively "bought" the lives of 40,000 - or maybe even 400,000 - civilians on the home front, who have not been the victims of another 9/11 attack, or attacks.

Wasn't the same rationale advanced to justify the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - that is to say, that the A-bombs killed thousands, but saved millions?

Hijacking worked when the hijackers followed a convention that most of the hijackees don't get hurt. September 11th worked once. Or, more specifically, it worked for the first three planes, but not when those in the fourth plane heard of the first three.

There are other ways, not yet tried, and not yet defended against, to hurt the United States. Infrastructure such as power lines, gas lines, bridges, aqueducts and urban chemical plants could be attacked to great effect. There are simply more vital infrastructure areas than can be reasonably defended. The September 11th attacks were far more on symbolic targets than vital targets. One is not going to bring the United States down by eliminating all our office space. If one looks at the London Blitz or similar large scale attacks on the civilian population, it takes a lot more destruction than September 11th before the reaction shifts from getting mad and getting even to considering backing down. September 11th woke a sleeping giant, and ticked him off.

Which wasn't very bright, and I believe the terrorist leaders have figured this out. Terrorist attacks against First World targets don't seem to be a priority. Bin Ladin got what he wanted, American troops on the ground on his home turf. Once that goal was achieved, there was no reason for further attacks.

***

At the end of World War II, there was a proposal floating to stop bombing Japan's cities. One of the chief lessons of the Pacific island hopping campaign was not to land troops without the support of land based air. The Japanese learned this the hard way at Guadalcanal. Their air bases were too far away. They could only operate over Guadalcanal at extreme range for a very short time. This gave the American defenders a large advantage in the air war. By 1945, the US doctrine of hopping over targets close to a base, not stretching beyond a practical range, but landing at an optimal distance from secure air fields was well established. The US had their act together, and knew how to do an amphibious war.

Of course, the Japanese knew this too. Knowing the location of US air fields, they knew where the next landings had to go. They put ten divisions right where the US landings were planned. The US was considering holding off use of a-bombs against cities so they could use their limited number of bombs to nuke the landing beaches. This would have killed a lot of Japanese soldiers, but left the Americans marching through their own fallout.

I don't know that this generation can properly judge the allied leaders of World War II. We seem to think that 4000 casualties in Iraq is a large number. The Americans lost 26,000 men on Iwo Jima alone.

Originally Posted by Anthony '58 II

I'm just waiting for someone to offer up the argument that the lives of the 4,000 U.S. troops that have been lost in Iraq have effectively "bought" the lives of 40,000 - or maybe even 400,000 - civilians on the home front, who have not been the victims of another 9/11 attack, or attacks.

Wasn't the same rationale advanced to justify the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - that is to say, that the A-bombs killed thousands, but saved millions?

Someone might make that argument, but it has all the merit of saying that the lives of crime victims have "bought" the lives of their neighbors who were not robbed, mugged or murdered. Actually, it has even less merit, since it appears there is a direct correlation between our warmongering and the growth of radical jihadi groups. Rather than suppress them, it's more likely that we are encouraging future attacks.

While I disagree with your point, I should note my agreement with Bob Butler. Future attacks of a symbolic nature are not likely, regardless. 9/11 was about attacking our two power bases: business and government. Whatever point they tried to make, it appears to have been a failure. The world did not rally to their cause ... not even the Islamic world.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Someone might make that argument, but it has all the merit of saying that the lives of crime victims have "bought" the lives of their neighbors who were not robbed, mugged or murdered. Actually, it has even less merit, since it appears there is a direct correlation between our warmongering and the growth of radical jihadi groups. Rather than suppress them, it's more likely that we are encouraging future attacks.

While I disagree with your point, I should note my agreement with Bob Butler. Future attacks of a symbolic nature are not likely, regardless. 9/11 was about attacking our two power bases: business and government. Whatever point they tried to make, it appears to have been a failure. The world did not rally to their cause ... not even the Islamic world.

Limits to terror. Or why the "War on Terror" was never about defending America from further 9/11s.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Someone might make that argument, but it has all the merit of saying that the lives of crime victims have "bought" the lives of their neighbors who were not robbed, mugged or murdered. Actually, it has even less merit, since it appears there is a direct correlation between our warmongering and the growth of radical jihadi groups. Rather than suppress them, it's more likely that we are encouraging future attacks.

While I disagree with your point, I should note my agreement with Bob Butler. Future attacks of a symbolic nature are not likely, regardless. 9/11 was about attacking our two power bases: business and government. Whatever point they tried to make, it appears to have been a failure. The world did not rally to their cause ... not even the Islamic world.

I never said that this was my point. My actual narrative was that desperate people - and desperate political entities - often do (or say) desperate things (even so, attacks on Israel have plummeted since known homicide-bomber sugar-daddy Saddam Hussein was removed from the scene - yesterday's despicable act of cowardice in Ashkelon notwithstanding).

In that same vein - have you gotten your stimulus check yet?

Originally Posted by Arkham '80

Limits to terror. Or why the "War on Terror" was never about defending America from further 9/11s.

Very interesting - and it's a ringing endorsement of a containment strategy, rather than a rollback strategy, to combat, and ultimately defeat, terrorism.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti...te-cnn-partner

Yes, we can transform this society into a flower of democracy:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/...ngs/index.html

raqi: 'I killed her with a machine gun'

* Story Highlights
* Residents of Basra have begun telling stories of militia massacres
* Mom says one son was killed for drinking alcohol, two others slain for their car
* Authorities: Man admits to killed 15 girls, including one 9 year old
* Dad in park says, "It's the first time that we have dared to come here in two years"


By Arwa Damon
CNN

BASRA, Iraq (CNN) -- The man, blindfolded and handcuffed, crouches in the corner of the detention center while an Iraqi soldier grills him about rampant crimes being carried out by gangs in the southern city of Basra.

"How many girls did you kill and rape?" the soldier asks.

"I raped one, sir," the man responds.

"What was her name?"

"Ahlam," he says.

Ahlam was a university student in the predominantly Shiite city of Basra. The detainee said the gang he was in kidnapped her as she was leaving the university, heading home.

"They forced me, and I killed her with a machine gun, sir," he says.

The suspect, who is unshaven and appears to be in his 20s or 30s, was arrested by Iraq security forces after they retook most of Basra in April.

CNN was shown what authorities say was his first confession. On it are the names of 15 girls whom he admitted kidnapping, raping and killing. The youngest girl on the list was just 9 years old.

Basra turned into a battleground between warring Shiite factions vying for control of the country's oil-rich south after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Basra's streets teemed with Shiite militias armed with weapons, mostly from Iran, according to the Iraqi forces and the U.S. military. Video Watch a mom describe her three sons killed »

For four years after the invasion, Basra was under the control of British forces, but they were unable to contain the violence and withdrew in September last year.

Women bore the brunt of the militias' extremist ideologies. The militants spray-painted threats on walls across Basra, warning women to wear headscarves and not to wear make-up. Women were sometimes executed for the vague charge of doing something "un-Islamic."

In the wasteland on the outskirts of Basra, dotted with rundown homes, the stench of death mixes with the sewage. Local residents told the Iraqi Army that executions often take place in the area, particularly for women, sometimes killed for something as seemingly inocuous as wearing jeans.

Militias implemented their own laws with abandon, threatening stores for displaying mannequins with bare shoulders or for selling Western music. Many store owners are still too frightened to speak publicly.

But the horrors of militia rule are now surfacing as some residents begin to feel more comfortable speaking out.

Inside her rundown home, Sabriya's watery eyes peer out from under her robe. She points to the first photo of one of her sons on the wall.

"This one was killed because he was drinking," she says.

She draws her finger across her neck and gestures at the next photo.

"This one was slaughtered for his car."

"This one the same," she adds, looking at the third.

Her three sons, her daughter and her sister were all killed by the hard-line militia. Her sister was slaughtered because she was a single woman living alone.

"They said [to her], 'Why don't you have a husband?' " Sabriya says. "They came in at night and put a pillow on her face and shot her in the head."

Sabriya lives on what was once dubbed "murder street" for the daily killings that happened there last year.

On the day CNN visited, dozens of young men sat where there used to be piles of bodies. Sheik Maktouf al-Maraiyani shudders at the memory.

"Every day, we would find 10 or 15 of our men killed," he says, adding sorrowfully "one of them was my son." His son was 25 years old.

Now, "murder street" is part of a citywide effort to get Basra back on its feet. In a project funded by U.S. forces, Sheikh Maktouf and others are being paid $20 a day and upwards to clean up trash.

Basra may be part of the country's oil rich south, but it wallows in its own sewage and trash. The stench of filth is impossible to escape. The effort also helps with the massive unemployment plaguing the city.

British forces officially handed over responsibility of Basra to Iraqi forces in December.

"The situation was so bad because the security forces were controlled by the militias," says Brig. Gen. Aziz al-Swady, who commands the 14th Iraq Army Divison.

To help curb the violence, British troops have returned to the city, adopting the U.S. approach of embedding with Iraqi units as advisers. The Iraqi prime minister also has flooded the city with additional troops, bringing in soldiers from western Iraq along with their American advisers.

"Now the citizens have started to trust the Iraqi security forces," said al-Swady.

The biggest difference is that residents are starting to leave their homes -- something unthinkable just a few months ago. At one of the parks in the city this past weekend, a father named Al'aa was out with his three young children and his wife.

"It's the first time that we have dared to come here in two years," he said.

The park was once often used for executions.
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Everyone, residents and soldiers alike, knows the battle for Basra is not over. Militias still lurk in the shadows, and the security gains may not last without economic gains.

"The most important thing, our government must focus on finding jobs, different jobs for these people," says Maj. Gen. Tariq al-Azawi.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/5800170.html

May 25, 2008, 8:25AM
After defying odds, Marine loses final battle
He endured 100 surgeries after a 2005 roadside bomb in Iraq, stunning doctors with progress

By SHARON COHEN


The young Marine came back from the war, with his toughest fight ahead of him.

Sgt. Merlin German waged that battle in the quiet of a Texas hospital, far from the dusty road in Iraq where a bomb exploded, leaving him with burns over 97 percent of his body.

No one expected him to survive.

But for more than three years, he would not surrender. He endured more than 100 surgeries and procedures. He learned to live with pain, to stare at a stranger's face in the mirror. He learned to smile again, to joke, to make others laugh.

He became known as the "Miracle Man."

But just when it seemed he would defy impossible odds, German lost his last battle this spring — an unexpected final chapter in a story many imagined would have a happy ending.

"I think all of us had believed in some way, shape or form that he was invincible," says Lt. Col. Evan Renz, who was German's surgeon and his friend. "He had beaten so many other operations. ... It just reminded us, he, too, was human."

It was near Ramadi, Iraq, on Feb. 21, 2005, that the roadside bomb detonated near German's Humvee, hurling him out of the turret and engulfing him in flames.

When Renz and other doctors at the burn unit at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio first got word from Baghdad, they told his family he really didn't have a chance. The goal: Get him back to America so his loved ones could say goodbye.

But when German arrived four days later, doctors, amazed by how well he was doing, switched gears. "We were going to do everything known to science," Renz says. "He was showing us he can survive."

Doctors removed his burn wounds and covered him with artificial and cadaver skin. They also harvested small pieces of German's healthy skin, shipping them off to a lab where they were grown and sent back.

Doctors took skin from the few places he wasn't burned: the soles of his feet, the top of his head and small spots on his abdomen and left shoulder.

Once those areas healed, doctors repeated the task. Again and again.

"Sometimes I do think I can't do it," German said last year in an Associated Press interview. "Then I think: Why not? I can do whatever I want."

Renz witnessed his patient's good and bad days.

"Early on, he thought, 'This is ridiculous. Why am I doing this? Why am I working so hard?' " Renz recalls. "But every month or so, he'd say, 'I've licked it.' ... He was amazingly positive overall. ... He never complained. He'd just dig in and do it."

Slowly, his determination paid off. He made enormous progress.

From a ventilator to breathing on his own.

From communicating with his eyes or a nod to talking.

From being confined to a hospital isolation bed with his arms and legs suspended — so his skin grafts would take — to moving into his own house and sleeping in his own bed.

Sometimes his repeated surgeries laid him up for days, and he'd lose ground in his rehabilitation. But he'd always rebound.

Even when he was hurting, he'd return to therapy — as long as he had his morning Red Bull energy drink.

"I can't remember a time where he said, 'I can't do it. I'm not going to try,' " says Sgt. Shane Elder, a rehabilitation therapy assistant.

That despite the constant reminders that he'd never be the same. The physical fitness buff who could run miles and do dozens of push-ups struggled, at first, just to sit up on the edge of his bed. The one-time saxophone player had lost his fingers. The Marine with the lady-killer smile now had a raw, ripple-scarred face.

Lt. Col. Grant Olbrich recalls a day in 2006 when he stopped by German's room and noticed he was crying softly. Olbrich, who heads a Marine patient affairs team at Brooke, says he sat with him awhile and asked: "What are you scared of?' He said, 'I'm afraid there will never be a woman who loves me.' "

Olbrich says that was the lowest he ever saw German, but even then "he didn't give up. ... He was unstoppable."

His mother, Lourdes, remembers her son another way: "He was never really scared of anything."

That toughness, says his brother, Ariel, showed up even when they were kids growing up in New York.

Playing football, German would announce: "Give me the ball. Nobody can knock me down."

In nearly 17 months in the hospital, German's "family" grew.

From the start, his parents, Lourdes and Hemery, were with him. They relocated to Texas. His mother helped feed and dress her son; they prayed together three, four times a day.

"She said she would never leave his side," Ariel says. "She was his eyes, his ears, his feet, his everything."

But many at the hospital also came to embrace German.

Norma Guerra, a public affairs spokeswoman who has a son in Iraq, became known as German's "Texas mom."

She read him action-packed stories at his bedside and arranged to have a DVD player in his room so he could watch his favorite gangster movies.

She sewed him pillows embroidered with the Marine insignia. She helped him collect New York Yankees memorabilia and made sure he met every celebrity who stopped by — magician David Blaine became a friend, and President Bush visited.

"He was a huge part of me," says Guerra, who had German and his parents over for Thanksgiving. "I remember him standing there talking to my older sister like he knew her forever."

German liked to gently tease everyone about fashion — his sense of style, and their lack of it.

Guerra says he once joked: "I've been given a second chance. I think I was left here to teach all you people how to dress."

Even at Brooke, he color-coordinated his caps and sneakers.

German also was something of an entrepreneur. Back in high school, he attended his senior prom, not with a date but with a giant bag of disposable cameras to make some quick cash from those who didn't have the foresight to bring their own.

At Brooke, he designed a T-shirt that he sometimes sold, sometimes gave away. On the front it read: "Got 3 percent chance of survival, what ya gonna do?" The back read, "a) Fight Through, b) Stay Strong, c) Overcome Because I Am a Warrior, d) All Of The Above." D is circled.

Every time he cleared a hurdle, the staff at Brooke cheered him on.

When he first began walking, Guerra says, word spread in the hospital corridors. "People would say, 'Did you know Merlin took his first step? Did you know he took 10 steps?' " she recalls.

German, in turn, was asked by hospital staff to motivate other burn patients when they were down or just not interested in therapy.

"I'd say, 'Hey, can you talk to this patient?' ... Merlin would come in ... and it was: Problem solved," says Elder, the therapist. "The thing about him was there wasn't anything in the burn world that he hadn't been through. Nobody could say to him, 'You don't understand.' "

German understood, too, that burn patients deal with issues outside the hospital because of the way they look.

"When he saw a group of children in public, he was more concerned about what they might think," says Renz, his surgeon. "He would work to make them comfortable with him."

And kids adored him, including Elder's two young sons. German had a habit of buying them toys with the loudest, most obnoxious sounds — and presenting them with a mischievous smile.

He especially loved his nieces and nephews; the feelings were mutual. One niece remembered him on a Web site as being "real cool and funny" and advising her to "forget about having little boyfriends and buying hot phones" and to concentrate on her education instead.

But he was closest to his mother. When the hospital's Holiday Ball approached in 2006, German told Guerra he wanted to surprise his mother by taking her for a twirl on the dance floor.

Guerra thought he was kidding. She knew it could be agony for him just to take a short walk or raise a scarred arm.

But she agreed to help, and they rehearsed for months, without his mother knowing. He chose a love song to be played for the dance: Have I Told You Lately? by Rod Stewart.

That night he donned his Marine dress blues and shiny black shoes — even though it hurt to wear them. When the time came, he took his mother in his arms and they glided across the dance floor.

Everyone stood and applauded. And everyone cried.

Clearly, it seemed, the courageous Marine was winning his long, hard battle.

Merlin German died after routine surgery to add skin to his lower lip.

He was already planning his next operations — on his wrists and elbows. But Renz also says with all the stress German's body had been subjected to in recent years, "it was probably an unfair expectation that you can keep doing this over and over again and not have any problems."

The cause of his death has not yet been determined.

"I may no more understand why he left us when he did than why he survived when he did," Renz says. "I don't think I was meant to know."

As people learned of his death last month, they flocked to his hospital room to pay their last respects: Doctors, nurses, therapists and others, many arriving from home, kept coming as Friday night faded into Saturday morning.

German was just 22.

He had so many dreams that will go unrealized: Becoming an FBI agent (he liked the way they dressed). Going to college. Starting a business. Even writing comedy.

But he did accomplish a major goal: He set up a foundation for burned children called "Merlin's Miracles" to raise money so these kids could enjoy life, whether it was getting an air conditioner for their home or taking a trip to Disney World, a place he loved.

On a sunny April afternoon, German was buried among the giant oaks and Spanish moss of Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell.

Memorial Day is a time to remember the fallen with parades, tributes and stories.

Sgt. Joe Gonzales, a Marine liaison at Brooke, has a favorite story about German.

It was the day he and German's mother were walking in the hospital hallway. German was ahead, wearing an iPod, seemingly oblivious to everyone else.

Suddenly, he did a sidestep.

For a second, Gonzales worried German was about to fall. But no.

"He just started dancing out of nowhere. His mom looked at me. She shook her head. There he was with a big old smile. Regardless of his situation, he was still trying to enjoy life."

http://watchingamerica.com/News/1095...the-iraq-lies/

http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4515
Whatever Happened to Iraq?
By Sherry Ricchiardi
Armando Acuna, public editor of the Sacramento Bee, turned a Sunday column into a public flogging for both his editors and the nation's news media. They had allowed the third-longest war in American history to slip off the radar screen, and he had the numbers to prove it.
The public also got a scolding for its meager interest in a controversial conflict that is costing taxpayers about $12.5 billion a month, or nearly $5,000 a second, according to some calculations. In his March 30 commentary, Acuna noted: "There's enough shame..for everyone to share."
He had watched stories about Iraq move from 1A to the inside pages of his newspaper, if they ran at all. He understood the editors' frustration over how to handle the mind-numbing cycles of violence and complex issues surrounding Operation Iraqi Freedom. "People feel powerless about this war," he said in an interview in April.
Acuna knew the Sacramento Bee was not alone.
For long stretches over the past 12 months, Iraq virtually disappeared from the front pages of the nation's newspapers and from the nightly network newscasts. The American press and the American people had lost interest in the war. The decline in coverage of Iraq has been staggering. During the first 10 weeks of 2007, Iraq accounted for 23 percent of the newshole fornetwork TV news. In 2008, it plummeted to 3 percent during that period. On cable networks it fell from 24 percent to 1 percent, according to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The numbers also were dismal for the country's dailies. By Acuna's count, during the first three months of this year, front-page stories about Iraq in the Bee were down 70 percent from the same time last year. Articles about Iraq once topped the list for reader feedback. By mid-2007, "Their interest just dropped off; it was noticeable to me," says the public editor. A daily tracking of 65 newspapers by the Associated Press confirms a dip in page-one play throughout the country. In September 2007, the AP found 457 Iraq-related stories (154 by the AP) on front pages, many related to a progress report delivered to Congress by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. Over the succeeding months, that number fell to as low as 49. A spike in March 2008 was largely due to a rash of stories keyed to the conflict's fifth anniversary, according to AP Senior Managing Editor Mike Silverman. During the early stages of shock and awe, Americans were glued to the news as Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in Baghdad and sweat-soaked Marines bivouacked in his luxurious palaces. It was a huge story when President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, and declared major combat operations were over. By March 2008, a striking reversal had taken place. Only 28 percent of Americans knew that 4,000 military personnel had been killed in the conflict, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Eight months earlier, 54 percent could cite the correct casualty rate. TV news was a vivid indicator of the declining interest. The three broadcast networks' nightly newscasts devoted more than 4,100 minutes to Iraq in 2003 and 3,000 in 2004. That leveled off to 2,000 annually. By late 2007, it was half that, according to Andrew Tyndall, who monitors the nightly news "In broadcast, there's a sense that the appetite for Iraq coverage has grown thin. The big issue is how many people stick with it. It is not less of a story," said Jeffrey Fager, executive producer of "60 Minutes," during the Reva and David Logan Symposium on Investigative Reporting in late April at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. The number of Iraq-related stories aired on "60 Minutes" has been consistent over the past two years. The total from April 2007 through March 2008 was 15, one fewer than during the same period the year before. Despite the pile of evidence of waning coverage, news managers interviewed for this story consistently maintained there was no conscious decision to back off. "I wasn't hearing that in our newsroom," says Margaret Sullivan, editor of the Buffalo News. Yet numbers show that attention to the war plummeted at the Buffalo paper as it did at other news outlets. Why the dramatic drop-off? Gatekeepers offer a variety of reasons, from the enormous danger for journalists on the ground in Iraq to plunging newsroom budgets and shrinking news space. Competing megastories on the home front like the presidential primaries and the sagging economy figure into the equation. So does the exorbitant cost of keeping correspondents in Baghdad. No one questioned the importance of a grueling war gone sour or the looming consequences for the United States and the Middle East. Instead, newsroom managers talked about the realities of life in a rapidly changing media market, including smaller newsholes and, for many, a laser-beam focus on local issues and events.
Los Angeles Times' foreign editor Marjorie Miller attributes the decline to three factors:
The economic downturn and the contentious presidential primaries have sucked oxygen from Iraq. "We have a woman, an African American and a senior running for president," Miller says. "That is a very big story."
With no solutions in sight, with no light at the end of the tunnel, war fatigue has become a factor. Over the years, a bleak sameness has settled into accounts of suicide bombings and brutal sectarian violence. Insurgents fighting counterinsurgents are hard to translate to an American audience.
The sheer cost of keeping correspondents on the ground in Baghdad is trimming the roster of journalists. The expense is "unlike anything we've ever faced. We have shouldered the financial burden so far, but we are really squeezed," Miller says. Earlier, the L.A. Times had as many as five Western correspondents in the field. The bureau is down to two or three plus Iraqi staff. Other media decision-makers echo Miller's analysis. When Lara Logan, the high-profile chief senior foreign correspondent for CBS News, is rotated out of Iraq, she might not be replaced, says her boss, Senior Vice President Paul Friedman. The network is sending in fewer Westerners from European and American bureaus and depending more on local staff, a common practice for media outlets with personnel in Iraq. "We won't pull out, but we are making adjustments," Friedman says. Friedman defends the cutbacks: "One of the definitions of news is change, and there are long periods now in Iraq when very little changes. Therefore, it's difficult for the Iraq story to fight its way on the air against other news where change is involved," such as the political campaign, he says. John Stack, Fox News Channel's vice president for newsgathering, has no qualms about allotting more airtime to the presidential campaign than to Iraq. "This is a very big story playing out on the screen every night... The time devoted to news is finite," Stack says. "It's a matter of shifting to another story of national interest." Despite diminished emphasis on the war, Fox has no plans to cut back its Baghdad operation. "We still have a full complement of people there, operating in a very difficult environment. That hasn't gone down at all," he says. Fox has two full reporting teams in Iraq as well as a bureau chief and some local staff, for a total of 25 to 30 people, according to Stack. In late 2007, the networks — CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and Fox — entertained the notion of pooling resources in Iraq to cut expenses. After much discussion, the idea was tabled. "It turned out not to be possible," Friedman says. "To some extent, our needs are very different." Cable TV is all about constant repetition; even during lulls it features correspondents standing in front of cameras making reports. "The networks don't do that and don't need the same kind of facilities," Friedman says. McClatchy Newspapers maintains a presence in Baghdad — a bureau chief, a rotating staffer generally from one of the chain's papers and six local staffers — but the decline in violence since the U.S. troop buildup last year has resulted in fewer daily stories, says Foreign Editor Roy Gutman. "We produce according to the news. During the [Iraqi] government's offensive in Basra [in March], we produced lengthy stories every day." To add another dimension to the coverage, McClatchy tapped into its Iraqi staff for compelling first-person accounts posted on its Washington bureau's Web site
New York Times Foreign Editor Susan Chira says she is content to run fewer stories than in the past. "But we want them to have impact. And, of course, when there are big running stories, we will stay on them every day."
Midsize dailies around the country face a different set of challenges. Many operate under mandates from their bosses to push local stories over national or international news in hope of boosting readership and advertising. In those publications, it often takes a strong community tie to propel Iraq onto page one. Case in point: During the first week of February, the one story about Iraq that made 1A in the Buffalo News was headlined, "Close to home while far off at war." It told how the latest gadgetry helps local service members stay in touch with loved ones. During the same week a year ago, four Iraq-related stories made 1A. None appeared to have a local angle. "There is strong local interest because we have a lot of service members over there and we have had quite a few deaths of local soldiers," Editor Sullivan says. "In my mind, there is no bigger nonlocal story. It's the expense, the lives, the policy issues, and what it means to the country's future. There is a general feeling that the media have tired of Iraq, but I have not." At Alabama's Birmingham News, it takes a significant development to get an Iraq-related story prominent play without a local link, says Executive Editor Hunter George. During the first week in February, the Birmingham paper ran only one story related to the war. The topic: "Brownies send goodies, cards to troops in Iraq." Editors did not sit in a news budget meeting and make a conscious decision to cut back on Iraq coverage, George says. He believes the repetitiveness of the storyline has something to do with the decline. "I see and hear it all the time. It seems like a bad dream, and the public's not interested in revisiting it unless there is a major development. If I'm outside the newsroom and Iraq comes up, I hear groans. People say, 'More bad news.' Stories about the economy are moving up the news scale." It was big news for Pennsylvania's Reading Eagle when a wounded soldier came home from Iraq and was met by some 50 bikers at the airport. The "Patriot Guard," as they are called, provided an escort. Townspeople slapped together a carnival to help raise money for a wheelchair ramp. "For us, it comes down to the grassroots level," says Eagle reporter Dan Kelly. Earlier that day, Kelly's editor had handed him an assignment about a Marine from nearby Exeter Township who rushed home from the war zone to visit his ailing grandfather. By the time he got there, he was facing a funeral instead. "We look for special circumstances like this," Kelly says. "We pick our battles." The Indianapolis Star ramped up coverage in January when the 76th Infantry Brigade Combat Team from the Indiana National Guard was redeployed to Iraq. The newspaper created a special Web page to help readers stay in touch with the more than 3,000 soldiers from around the state, including graphics showing their hometowns and how the combat gear they wear works in the war zone. "I don't want to mislead you and say our coverage has been consistent over the past 12 months. It has rolled and dipped. We have had calls from people who believe we underplay events like bombings where several people are killed," says Pam Fine, the Star's managing editor until early April. Front-page coverage of Iraq was the same in the first three months of 2007 and 2008. A total of 23 stories ran in each period. Fine left the paper to become the Knight Chair in News, Leadership and Community at the University of Kansas. The reader representative for the San Francisco Chronicle doesn't think placement of stories about Iraq makes much difference. He reasons that five years in, most readers have formed clear opinions about the war. They're not likely to change their minds one way or another if a story runs on page one or page three, says Dick Rogers. "The public has become accustomed to the steady drumbeat of violence out of Iraq. A report of 20 or 30 killed doesn't bring fresh insight for a lot of people."
Americans might care if they could witness more of the human toll. That's the approach the Washington Post's Dana Milbank took in an April 24 piece titled, "What the Family Would Let You See, the Pentagon Obstructs."
When Lt. Col. Billy Hall was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in April, his family gave the media permission to cover the ceremony — he is among the highest-ranking officers to be killed in Iraq. But, according to Milbank, the military did everything it could to keep the journalists away, isolating them some 50 yards away behind a yellow rope. The "de facto ban on media at Arlington funerals fits neatly" with White House efforts "to sanitize the war in Iraq," and that, in turn, has helped keep the bloodshed out of the public's mind, Milbank wrote in his Washington Sketch feature. There have been similar complaints over the years about the administration's policy that bans on-base photography of coffins returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Despite the litany of reasons, some journalists still take a "shame on you" attitude toward those who have relegated the Iraq war to second-class status. Sig Christenson, military writer for the San Antonio Express-News, has made five trips to the war zone and says he would go back in a heartbeat. "This is not a story we can afford to ignore," he says. "There are vast implications for every American, right down to how much gasoline costs when we go to the pump." Christenson, a cofounder of the organization MRE — Military Reporters and Editors — believes the media have an obligation to provide context and nuance and make clear the complexities of the war so Americans better understand its seriousness. "That's our job," he says.
Along the same lines, Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, faults newsroom leaders for shortchanging "the biggest political and moral issue of our time." "You can forgive the American public for being shocked at the recent violence in Basra [in March]. From the lack of press coverage that's out there, they probably thought the war was over," says Mitchell, who wrote about media performance in the book "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits — and the President — Failed on Iraq."
Both journalists point to cause and effect: The public tends to take cues from the media about what is important. If Iraq is pushed to a back burner, the signal is clear — the war no longer is a top priority. It follows that news consumers lose interest and turn their attention elsewhere. The Pew study found exactly that: As news coverage of the war diminished, so too did the public interest in Iraq. Ellen Hume, research director at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media and a former journalist, believes the decline in Iraq news could be linked to a larger issue — profits. "The problem doesn't seem to be valuing coverage of the war; it's more about the business model of journalism today and what that market requires," Hume says. "There is no sense that [the media] are going to be able to meet the numbers that their corporate owners require by offering news about a downer subject like Iraq. It's a terrible dilemma for news organizations."Still, there has been some stunningly good reporting on Iraq over the past year. Two of the Washington Post's six Pulitzer Prizes were war-related. Anne Hull and Dana Priest won the public service award for revealing the neglect of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Steve Fainaru won in the international reporting category for an examination of private security contractors in Iraq. McClatchy's Baghdad bureau chief, Leila Fadel, collected the George R. Polk Award for outstanding foreign reporting. Judges offered high praise for her vivid depictions of the agonizing plight of families in ethnically torn neighborhoods. CBS took two Peabody Awards, one for Scott Pelley's report on the killings of civilians in the Iraqi city of Haditha on "60 Minutes," another for Kimberly Dozier's report about two female veterans who lost limbs in Iraq on "CBS News Sunday Morning." Dozier herself was wounded in Iraq in May 2006. ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff, who was injured in Iraq in January 2006, received a Peabody Award for "Wounds of War," a series of reports about injured veterans. There have been a series of groundbreaking investigations over the past year. In one of the most recent, the New York Times' David Barstow documented how the Pentagon cultivated military analysts to generate favorable news for the Bush administration's wartime performance. Many of the talking heads, including former generals, were being coached on what to tell viewers on television. The Times continues to have a dominant presence on the ground in Iraq, sinking millions into maintaining its Baghdad complex, home and office to six or seven Western correspondents and a large Iraqi staff. Foreign Editor Chira says it has been more challenging to recruit people to go to Baghdad, but "we remain completely committed to maintaining a robust presence in Iraq." Those are notable exceptions; no doubt there are more. But overall, Iraq remains the biggest nonstory of the day unless major news is breaking.
Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, points to May 24, 2007, as a major turning point in the coverage of U.S. policy toward Iraq. That's the day Congress voted to continue to fund the war without troop withdrawal timetables, giving the White House a major victory in a clash with the Democratic leadership over who would control the purse strings and thus the future of the war. Democrats felt they had a mandate from Americans to bring the troops home. President Bush stuck to a hard line and came out the victor. "The political fight was over," Jurkowitz says. "Iraq no longer was a hot story. The media began looking elsewhere."
Statistics from a report by Jurkowitz released in March 2008 support his theory. From January through May 2007, Iraq accounted for 20 percent of all news measured by PEJ's News Coverage Index. That period included the announcement of the troop "surge." "But from the time of the May funding vote through the war's fifth anniversary on March 19, 2008, coverage plunged by about 50 percent. In that period, the media paid more than twice as much attention to the presidential campaigns than the war," according to PEJ.
"You could see the coverage of the political debate [over Iraq] shrink noticeably. The drop was dramatic," says Jurkowitz, who believes the press has an obligation to cover stories about Iraq even when the political landscape changes. "It is hard to say that the media has spurred any meaningful debate in America on this."
Is there anything to the concept of war fatigue or a psychological numbing that comes with rote reports of violence? Susan Tifft, professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, believes there is. She reasons that humans do adapt when the abnormal gradually becomes normal, such as a bloody and seemingly endless conflict far from America's shores. Tifft explains that despite tensions of the Cold War, America's default position for many years had been peace. Now the default position — the environment in which Americans live — is war. "And somehow we have gotten used to it. That's why it seems like wallpaper or Muzak. It's oddly normal and just part of the atmosphere," she says. Does an acceptance of the status quo indicate helplessness or rational resignation on the part of the public and the press? Is it a survival mechanism? Harvard University Professor Howard Gardner, a psychologist and social scientist, has explored what it is about the way humans operate that might allow this to happen. Gardner explains that when a news story becomes repetitive, people "habituate" — the technical term for what happens when they no longer take in information. "You can be sure that if American deaths were going up, or if there was a draft, then there would not be acceptance of the status quo," Gardner wrote in an April 17 e-mail.
"But American deaths are pretty small, and the children of the political, business and chattering classes are not dying, and so the war no longer is on the radar screen most of the time. The bad economy has replaced it, and no one has yet succeeded in tying the trillion-dollar war to the decline in the economy." New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof is one who has tried. In a March 23 op-ed column, he quoted Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz as saying the "present economic mess" is very much related to the Iraq war, which also "is partially responsible for soaring oil prices." Stiglitz calculated the eventual total cost to be about $3 trillion. Kristof tossed out plenty of fodder for stories: "A congressional study by the Joint Economic Committee found that the sums spent on the Iraq war each day could enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start or give Pell Grants to 153,000 students to attend college... [A] day's Iraq spending would finance another 11,000 border patrol agents or 9,000 police officers." In Denver, Jason Salzman has been thinking along the same lines. The media critic for the Rocky Mountain News suggested in a February 16 column that news organizations "treat the economic costs of the war as they've treated U.S. casualties." After the death of the 3,000th American soldier, for instance, his newspaper printed the names of all the dead on the front page. To mark economic milestones, Salzman would like to see page one filled with graphics representing dollars Colorado communities have lost to the war. "It's hard for me to realize why more reporters don't do these stories about the impact of the cost of the war back home," he said in an interview. Another aspect of the war that could use more scrutiny is the Iraqi oil industry: Where is the money going? Who is benefiting? Why isn't oil money paying for a fair share of reconstruction costs? Similarly, much more attention could be paid to the ramifications of stretching America's military to the limit. And what about the impact of the war on the lives of ordinary Iraqis (see "Out of Reach," April/May 2006)? In April, Los Angeles Times correspondent Alexandra Zavis filed a story about a ballet school in Baghdad that had become an oasis for children of all ethnic and religious backgrounds. "Now, more than ever," Zavis wrote in an e-mail interview, it "is the responsibility of journalists to put a name and a face on the mind-numbing statistics, to take readers into the lives of ordinary Iraqis, and to find ways to convey what this unimaginable bloodshed means to the people who live it." Jurkowitz's March 2008 report cited the "inverse relationship between war coverage and the coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign — an early-starting, wide-open affair that has fascinated the press since it began in earnest in January 2007. As attention to Iraq steadily declined, coverage of the campaign continued to grow in 2007 and 2008, consuming more of the press' attention and resources. "Moreover, the expectation that Iraq would dominate the campaign conversation proved to be wrong," the report said. It was the economy instead. Jurkowitz cites what he calls an eye-catching statistic: In the first three months of 2008, coverage of the campaign outstripped war coverage by a ratio of nearly 11 to 1, or 43 percent of newshole compared with 4 percent. But all that soon could change. "The [Iraq] story, we believe, remains as important as ever, and the debate about the future conduct of the war and the level of American troop presence in Iraq during the presidential campaign makes it crucial for the American public to be well informed," says the New York Times' Chira. Jurkowitz agrees. That's why he's predicting a renaissance in Iraq coverage in the coming months. Battle lines already have been drawn: Sen. John McCain, the presumed Republican candidate, has vowed to stay the course in Iraq until victory is achieved. The Democrats favor withdrawing U.S. forces, perhaps beginning as early as six months after taking the oath of office. (snip/trunc)

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/10/ira...ery/index.html

From Terry Frieden
CNN Justice Department Producer
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A retired U.S. Army colonel pleaded guilty Tuesday to awarding contracts in Iraq to a Kuwait-based firm in exchange for gifts.

Levonda Selph of Virginia admitted accepting $4,000 in cash and a $5,000 vacation to Thailand from the unidentified contractor, which was awarded $12 million in contracts to operate Defense Department warehouses in Iraq.

She pleaded guilty to charges of bribery and conspiracy. She was secretly indicted on those charges in October; the charges weren't disclosed until her court appearance Tuesday.

Under terms of a plea agreement, Selph could receive up to 33 months in jail. She promised to repay the government $9,000 and to cooperate in an ongoing investigation.

Prosecutors said Selph was a lieutenant colonel at Camp Victory in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 when she led a committee that awarded the warehouse contracts.

The Justice Department said she will be free until her sentencing October 14 but will not be allowed to leave the country.