Army Captains Speak Out

This issue of the twelve former Army captains speaking out about the war in Iraq has been covered in many blogs, left and right, by now (Phil Carter's post is a must-read). These individuals were all deployed to Iraq at least once, and here's what they had to say.

U.S. forces, responsible for too many objectives and too much "battle space," are vulnerable targets. The sad inevitability of a protracted draw-down is further escalation of attacks -- on U.S. troops, civilian leaders and advisory teams. They would also no doubt get caught in the crossfire of the imminent Iraqi civil war.

Iraqi security forces would not be able to salvage the situation. Even if all the Iraqi military and police were properly trained, equipped and truly committed, their 346,000 personnel would be too few. As it is, Iraqi soldiers quit at will. The police are effectively controlled by militias. And, again, corruption is debilitating. U.S. tax dollars enrich self-serving generals and support the very elements that will battle each other after we're gone.

This is Operation Iraqi Freedom and the reality we experienced. This is what we tried to communicate up the chain of command. This is either what did not get passed on to our civilian leadership or what our civilian leaders chose to ignore. While our generals pursue a strategy dependent on peace breaking out, the Iraqis prepare for their war -- and our servicemen and women, and their families, continue to suffer.

There is one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately. A scaled withdrawal will not prevent a civil war, and it will spend more blood and treasure on a losing proposition.

This language, of course, has the right wingers excited. They hate it when "phoney soldiers," i.e., those military professionals who don't support the current administration's policies, speak out in public. As Tbogg notes, these critics of our soldiers like to start out (or finish) with "I value their service, but..." I'm going to pick on my buddy Murdoc, since I think he shows the symptoms of this disease.

Murdoc tries not to spend much time criticizing commentary from those in the military or that have previously served. After all, Murdoc hasn't been there. But to present the situation as one of "generals pursuing a strategy dependent on peace breaking out" is simply idiotic. That sounds like uninformed anti-war parroting, not analysis by former military officers.

Speaking of anti-war parroting, they also mention this:

There is one way we might be able to succeed in Iraq. To continue an operation of this intensity and duration, we would have to abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service. Short of that, our best option is to leave Iraq immediately. [emphasis again Murdoc's]

Get that? Either we START THE DRAFT or we GET OUT NOW.

I haven't met anyone in the service who thinks a Draft has any chance of working at all. Nearly everyone I've talked to who likes the idea of a Draft likes it because they think it will give the antiwar movement the traction it needs to stop the war. Talk about pursuing a strategy dependent on peace breaking out.

Call Murdoc a dumb civilian, but he smells spokespeople for an organization of some sort. And it ain't the Wednesday evening ladies' quilting club. It will be interesting to learn what link these 12 former captains have to each other and how they all ended up on the editorial page of the WaPo together.

I think Murdoc conveniently ignores how we need 180,000 contractors plus our 160,000 soldiers to maintain operations. Why not have a draft? It's not the operators who think it's crazy, it's the politicians who refuse to consider the option. After all, all the American public needs to do is shop at the malls - they don't have to actually sacrifice their time and money to the military.

Yes, they're all being paid off by MoveOn.org, it's impossible to think that young Army officers (not to mention 20-odd generals and the seven NCOs) could have an opinion of this war contrary to the politicians generals running it. Amazingly, some of the right-wingers (to include Murdoc) fault these captains because they haven't been in theater within the last year. Obviously, they haven't been privy to the effects of The Surge(TM) - unlike this guy, for instance.

At the beginning of the year they claimed a series of downed helicopters, including the Blackwater Security chopper we responded to. They killed all four of the contractors point blank, one of them execution style and attempted to smuggle the bodies out before we got there. They responded by shooting at us with anti-aircraft guns from a high rise building. After talking with them, we found out they were present during the attack that killed my friend Chevy on March 14.

Dude.

What must have been an awkward meeting turned into an agreement between coalition forces and 1920: they would stop attacking us if we helped them root out Al Qaeda. They would send one dude on patrol with us, and he’d point out Al Qaeda members and safe houses. They were restricted from carrying weapons during the day and would patrol at night. Things got off to a rough start. Now and again a helicopter would see a car full of gunmen and destroy it. They turned out to be 1920 members on more than one occasion. After we killed a dude with an AK, we always wondered if he was an unlucky Al Qaeda member or a really unlucky 1920 member. Most of us simply considered them a lesser enemy and didn’t care much when we killed our dubious friends by mistake. A common suggestion when we got a source was to “dispose” of him after he outlived his usefulness.

When word got out to the press that we were in cahoots with insurgents, it was spun out of control. General Mixon said something along the lines of “we can’t be sure they all have killed Americans.” Like there is an acceptable percentage of those who have blown an American soldier to pieces. I’m not sure of the opinion of the public at large for reasons that are obvious, but it seems to border on unacceptable. It says a lot about the progress of this war when we’re siding with one insurgent group to battle another. If Jack Bauer doesn’t negotiate with terrorists, why does the American army?

Must be another phony soldier, next generation.

Comments

[bigfoot]

I stopped reading Murdoc the first time when he rather strongly hinted that Hadji-GirlGate was a lie to discredit the war effort. I put him back into my Google Reader a few weeks ago--he does address some interesting subjects at times. This time he gets a permaban for allowing the "Phil Carter is a fraud" comment to stay up.

[Murdoc]

The only name calling comments I delete are very serious cases of commenter vs. commenter name-calling. Names called at me or at those not taking part in the conversation will generally stay up. If you don't like the rule, I can't help it. I've deleted very few (less than a dozen) comments in the four and a half years I've run my site, and they all have [comment deleted] comments up to show that I deleted something. I've defended Carter previously after some similar name calling, FWIW.

Regarding Hadji Girl, I didn't "strongly hint" that it was a hoax, I *flat out said* it was. Then, when more facts than the first strongly-biased news report came out, I updated my post. Also FWIW, the news story I called a hoax was not very accurate once the song itself was heard. Post is here.

If that's worth a ban, I'll probably get over it.