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First off, I have a court hearing today so posting will be limited.
Iraq and the Presidential Campaign
by nehpets84 Sat Mar 08, 2008
A lot is said around here about Iraq, especially as it relates to the current campaign for the Presidency.
As some of you know, I just got done with four years as an intelligence analyst in the 82nd Airborne Division. I know a little bit about Iraq, because I was there for a year.
I often find myself responding to comments people make about the situation in Iraq, because it's the only topic where I really feel that I can add something unique and of value to the conversation. But I guess most of those remarks, left as comments on various threads, go unread most of the time and so I find myself responding the same way to the same comments. So I figured I would just write this and be done with it.
I was an intelligence analyst in Mosul from July 2006 to July 2007. Mosul is a city in northern Iraq, just outside the region traditionally known as Kurdistan (or just inside, if you ask the Kurds). With a population of 1.8 million people, it is Iraq's third largest city, behind Baghdad and Basra. The Tigris river passes right through Mosul, making the city much greener than the rest of the Ninevah Province, which is mostly desert. Mosul is a fairly cosmopolitan city in comparison to many places in Iraq, with a decent mix of Sunni, Shia, and Kurd living side by side and (at least when we first arrived) relatively little ethnic strife.
My rank when we arrived in Mosul was Sergeant, which is the first rank where you're considered a Noncommissioned Officer and formally placed in charge of people (except for Corporal, which doesn't count). I had just one soldier working for me when we arrived, and we were tasked with providing intelligence for our unit on the entire city - as I said earlier, Iraq's third largest. It was a daunting task, especially because neither one of us had ever been to a combat zone before. When we first ambled into the unit headquarters, we frankly didn't have too much of an idea about what to do. Both of us had gone through the Army's old intelligence training program, which had been focused on fighting North Korea - a military that would adhere closely to textbook soviet doctrine. Obviously, Iraq was different kettle of tea.
Nonetheless, we got to work. We learned a lot very quickly from the unit we were replacing. In the first days, I was working eighteen to twenty hours a day, trying to learn from the old unit on my shift, and then teach what I had learned to my soldier on his shift. For the next 365 days, neither one of us ever worked less than a twelve-hour day, except for the two weeks when he went home on R&R.
We worked hard, and we were willing to work hard. An intelligence analyst, if he does his job well, helps to keep the other people in his unit alive. He helps to keep his friends safe (I should say "or she," because both of my immediate superiors were female. Please nobody take offense). We gathered information and reporting from various open-source and classified sources, and we distilled that information until it began to paint pictures for us. We were very much like detectives, tracking down the locations of terrorist leaders, learning the plans of local insurgent cells, and figuring out ways to avoid the hazards these things presented. When we felt we had a relatively good idea of the location of a specific target, we would recommend ways to eliminate that target.
I want to say this: I am proud of the work we did over there. I am against this war, but I do not regret for one moment any of the times when I helped to cause the capture or killing of any insurgent or terrorist (two different things, obviously, and we recognized that).
The people we were specifically targeting were not good guys; regardless of your view of the war, these people could never be seen as sympathetic characters. The very first high-level terrorist captured while I was in Iraq - in fact, someone captured on the work of the outgoing unit just as we arrived - was an al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) leader in Tal Afar. Most of the time, terrorist leaders and financiers stay out of the dirty work themselves, choosing instead simply to direct or pay for operations, respectively. Not this guy. This gentleman liked to make Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs - roadside bombs notorious for killing Americans. That, I think, is a legitimate way to fight an enemy you can't beat on conventional terms. But the way this gentleman went about that was something else altogether. I'll just tell you: he kidnapped young Iraqi boys, mostly between 8 and 12 years old, from the streets of Tal Afar. He sodomized them and killed them. Then he placed explosives in their bodies and left them on roadsides to detonate when they inevitably attracted the attention of concerned American or Iraqi soldiers.
Here's another story. You may have read about this one in the New York Times. The Ninevah province is more diverse than you might think. In addition to Arabs, there are Kurds and Turkomen. In addition to Muslims, there are Christians and Yazidis. The Yazidi sect practices a religion that basically combines a lot of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and then throws in some more mystical stuff as well. Well, one day a Yazidi girl who lived in a village north of Mosul fell in love with a Sunni Muslim boy, and converted to his religion so she could marry him. In response, her village freaked out and stoned her to death. Naturally, a lot of Sunnis were gravely offended by this, seeing it as an insult to their religion. But what were they to do? Well, once again, AQI had the answer, and a guy I had been targeting for several months came up with a plan. This individual knew that many Yazidis commuted to Mosul to work in one of the city's textile mills (like John Edwards' dad! Sorry, humor at an inappropriate time, I know). So one day he sent his people out, and stopped the bus that carried these Yazidis home at the end of the day. The Yazidis, young and old, male and female, were dragged off of the bus, lined up outside of a mosque, made to kneel in a field, and shot in the back of the head. Twenty-one Yazidis were killed outside that mosque.
The person who carried out that slaughter was also responsible for a lot of the trouble going on in Mosul. He regularly arranged for Imams who preached peace to be kidnapped and beheaded. He intimidated professors at the University into helping to identify pro-western students to be killed. He orchestrated suicide bombings in crowded marketplaces, regularly ending the lives of innocent Iraqis. He was an all-around bad guy, and although I always felt we were getting closer and closer to catching him - and indeed, we almost got him not once but twice, missing him (we found out later) only by the slimmest of margins - but in the end, just as we were getting ready to come home, we learned that he had been killed by some of his own people for having killed another terrorist leader.
I bring all this up to point out two things:
One, this war has caused a ridiculous amount of suffering for the Iraqi people. Whatever we do to try to help, the fact is that although we try to keep Americans as safe as possible over there, there is little we can do to protect average Iraqi citizens who do not fully support the terrorist and insurgent elements. Countless thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed because of our foolish decision to invade that country. Add to this the fact that you can't keep Americans safe 100% of the time, either. In my unit, we lost only one soldier, and sent just a few more home wounded. Other units lost many more soldiers while we were there. Whether you lose one of your friends or a dozen, it's too many. Standing on an airstrip in the middle of the night and saluting the flag-draped coffin of someone you were joking with only the day before is a heart-wrenching experience. It has the effect of causing time and space to become disjointed in a way that doesn't make any sense and takes a lot of time to get better.
That is why I couldn't support, in the primary, a candidate who helped to cause this war. I respect both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. They're both smart, capable people who've done a lot of good. But Sen. Clinton voted for the war, and Sen. Edwards co-sponsored the resolution. I realize that everyone makes mistakes; however, I think that our leaders need to be held accountable for their decisions. I supported Barack Obama because he had the courage and judgment to oppose the war from the beginning (and I don't fault him for voting to continue funding the war - we shouldn't have gone, but if you're going to send me anyway, I'd like to have body armor and food, please). When three major candidates are vying for the Democratic nomination, and two of them helped to create the biggest foreign policy blunder of a generation, I feel morally obligated for the sake of my friends who are still in the service to support the candidate who opposed that decision.
All that said, guess what? If it comes down to Clinton versus McCain, whatever anger I might feel about my view of how Senator Clinton has won the nomination will have to be put to the side. Again, I will feel morally obligated to support the candidate that is at least now acknowledging the mistake of invading Iraq and the need to get out. That will mean voting for Clinton over "100 Years" McCain. Ending this war is a responsibility that I take very seriously, and that I take very personally.
All that was reason number one for this diary. Reason number two is this: there are a few people posting around here who have suggested - to me, in particular - that the American soldiers serving in Iraq are criminals, comparable to the Nazis in WWII. That is pure silliness. The people we targeted were undeniably awful, evil human beings with a desire only to maim and destroy - not just Americans, but Iraqis as well. They committed disgusting, obscene acts and often hid behind religion to do it. Every unit I worked with took extremely seriously its responsibility to prevent the loss of innocent life. The one soldier we lost, a Kiowa pilot, was killed because he chose not to fire on a large group of obviously armed, threatening terrorists after observing that there was a large number of children in their midst (some of the more brazen fighters sometimes surround themselves with children, knowing we'll be less likely to shoot). He didn't want to be responsible for the death of children, so he didn't shoot. He had to know that they would shoot at him - and they did. Approximately thirty of them all pointed their AK-47s at the sky and he was killed. This is the caliber of soldier that gets deployed to Iraq. This is the extent to which 99% of us go to avoid the loss of innocent life. Calling us criminals is simply inaccurate and insane. Believe what you want about this war and our reasons for waging it; believe what you want about our reasons for continuing it. But know that the only thing we're doing on the ground is attempting to protect innocent life until someone finally brings us home. DailyKos
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