Hans Blix and David Kay both stated that it was likely a stray weapon and as the bomb was unmarked that the perpetrators likely did not know what kind of a bomb it was.
Summary
The strategy of the United States in its war with radical Islam is in a state
of crisis. The global strategic framework is in much better shape than the
tactical situation in the Iraq theater of operations -- but this is of only
limited comfort to Washington because massive tactical failure in Iraq could
lead to strategic collapse. The situation is balanced on the razor's edge.
The United States could recover from its tactical failures, or suffer a
massive defeat if it fails to do so. One thing is certain: The United States
cannot remain balanced on the razor's edge indefinitely.
Analysis
Most wars reach a moment of crisis, when the outcome hangs in the balance and
in which weakness and errors, military or political, can shape victory or put
it permanently out of reach. Sometimes these moments of crisis come suddenly
and are purely military, such as the Battle of Midway. Sometimes they are a
long time brewing and are primarily political in nature, like the Tet
Offensive in Vietnam. These are moments when planning, judgment and luck can
decide victors -- and when bad planning, lack of judgment and bad luck can
undermine the best and brightest. It is the moment when history balances on
the razor's edge. The U.S.-Islamist war is now, it seems to us, balanced on
that edge.
There are some who argue that it is not reasonable to speak of the
confrontation between the United States and al Qaeda as a war. It certainly
does not, in any way, resemble World War II. It is nevertheless very much a
war. It consists of two sides that are each making plans, using violence and
attempting to shape the political future of a major region of the globe --
the Muslim world. One side masses large forces, the other side disperses much
smaller forces throughout the globe. But the goals are the goals of any war:
to shape the political future. And the means are the same as in any war: to
kill sufficient numbers of the enemy in order to break his will to fight and
resist. It might not look like wars the United States has fought in the past,
but it is most certainly a war -- and it is a war whose outcome is in doubt.
On a strategic level, the United States has been the victor since the Sept.
11 attacks. Yet strategic victories can be undermined by massive tactical
failures, and this is what the United States is facing now. Iraq is a single
campaign in a much broader war. However, as frequently occurs in wars,
unintended consequences dominate the battlefield. The United States intended
to occupy Iraq and move on to other campaigns -- but failures in planning,
underestimation of the enemy and command failures have turned strategic
victory into a tactical nightmare. That tactical nightmare is now threatening
to undermine not only the Iraqi theater of operations, but also the entire
American war effort. It is threatening to reverse a series of al Qaeda
defeats. If the current trend continues, the tactical situation will
undermine U.S. strategy in Iraq, and the collapse of U.S. strategy in Iraq
could unravel the entire U.S. strategy against al Qaeda and the Islamists.
The question is whether the United States has the honesty to face the fact
that it is a crisis, the imagination to craft a solution to the problems in
Iraq and the luck that the enemy will give it the time it needs to regroup.
That is what war looks like on the razor's edge.
The Strategic Situation
In the midst of the noise over Iraq, it is essential to grasp the strategic
balance and to understand that on that level, the United States has done
relatively well. To be more precise, al Qaeda has done quite poorly. It is
one of the paradoxes of American war-fighting that, having failed to
articulate coherent goals, the Bush administration is incapable of pointing
to its real successes. But this is an excruciatingly great failure on the
part of the administration. It was Napoleon who said, "The moral is to the
physical as 3-1," by which he meant that how a nation or army views its
successes is more important than what its capabilities are. The failure to
tend to the morale of the nation, to articulate a strategy and demonstrate
progress, is not a marginal failure. It is the greatest possible failure of
political leadership in wartime.
Nevertheless al Qaeda has failed in its most fundamental goal. There has been
no mass rising in the Islamic world, nor has a single Muslim government
fallen. Nor, for that matter, has a single Islamic government shifted its
position in support of al Qaeda. To the contrary, a series of Muslim
governments -- the most important of which is Saudi Arabia -- have shifted
their positions toward active and effective opposition to al Qaeda. The
current attacks by al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia are a reflection of the shift in
Saudi policy that has occurred since just before the invasion of Iraq.
Saudi Arabia is far from the only country to have shifted its strategy. Iran
-- for all of its bombast -- has, through complex back-channel negotiations
with the United States as well as a complex re-evaluation of its strategic
position, changed its behavior since January 2002. Syria, while still not
fully in control, has certainly become more circumspect in its behavior.
Prior to the Iraq war, these governments ranged from hostile to
uncooperative; they since have shifted to a spectrum ranging from minimally
cooperative to fully cooperative.
Since the United States could not hunt down al Qaeda, cell by cell and
individual by individual, it devised an alternative strategy that is less
effective in the short run but more effective in the long run -- and the only
strategy available. Washington sought to change the behavior of enabling
countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, by making the potential threat from the
United States greater than the potential threat from al Qaeda. By occupying
Iraq and surrounding Saudi Arabia with military forces, the United States
compelled a reluctant and truculent Riyadh to comply with American wishes.
In the long run, changes in the behavior of these governments -- and of other
Muslim governments, from Islamabad to Tripoli -- represent the only way to
defeat al Qaeda. To the simplistic American question of, "Are we safer today
than we were a year ago?" the answer is, "Probably not." To the question of
whether the United States is on a path that might make it safer in five
years, the answer is "Probably yes," assuming the U.S. effort doesn't
collapse under the weight of its pyramiding mistakes in Iraq.
We would argue that the political shifts in the Muslim world that have helped
the United States were aided significantly by the invasion of Iraq. We would
certainly agree that Islamic opposition to the United States solidified -- we
doubt that there was much room for intensification -- but we would also argue
that opinion is significant to the extent to which it turns into war-fighting
capability. The Poles despised the Germans and the Japanese were not fond of
the Americans, but neither could expel the occupier simply on the strength of
public opinion. It is the shifts in government policy that contained radical
Islamist tendencies that should be the focal point, and the invasion of Iraq
served that purpose.
Tactical Failures?
It is at that point that things started to go wrong -- not with the grand
strategy of the United States, but with the Iraq strategy itself. A string of
intelligence failures, errors in judgment and command failures have conspired
to undermine the U.S. position in Iraq and reverse the strategic benefits.
These failures included:
* A failure to detect that preparations were under way
for a guerrilla war in the event that Baghdad fell.
* A failure to quickly recognize that a guerrilla war was under way in Iraq,
and a delay of months before the reality was recognized and a strategy
developed for dealing with it.
* A failure to understand that the United States did not have the resources
to govern Iraq if all Baathist personnel were excluded.
* A failure to understand the nature of the people the United States was
installing in the Iraqi Governing Council -- and in particular, the complex
loyalties of Ahmed Chalabi and his relationship to Iraq's Shia and the
Iranian government. The United States became highly dependent on individuals
about whom it lacked sufficient intelligence.
* A failure to recognize that the Sunni guerrillas were regrouping in
February and March 2004, after their defeat in the Ramadan offensive.
* Completely underestimating the number of forces needed for the occupation
of Iraq, and cavalierly dismissing accurate Army estimates in favor of lower
estimates that rapidly became unsupportable.
* Failing to step up military recruiting in order to increase the total
number of U.S. ground forces available on a worldwide basis. Failing to
understand that the difference between defeating an army and occupying a
country had to be made up with ground forces.
These are the particular failures. The general failures are a compendium of
every imaginable military failing:
* Failing to focus on the objective. Rather than remembering why U.S. forces
were in Iraq and focusing on that, the Bush administration wandered off into
irrelevancies and impossibilities, such as building democracy and eliminating
Baath party members. The administration forgot its mission.
* Underestimating the enemy and overestimating U.S. power. The enemy was
intelligent, dedicated and brave. He was defending his country and his home.
The United States was enormously powerful but not omnipotent. The casual
dismissal of the Iraqi guerrillas led directly to the failure to anticipate
and counter enemy action.
* Failure to rapidly identify errors and rectify them through changes of
plans, strategies and personnel. Error is common in war. The measure of a
military force is how honestly errors are addressed and rectified. When a
command structure begins denying that self- evident problems are facing them,
all is lost. The administration's insistence over the past year that no
fundamental errors were committed in Iraq has been a cancer eating through
all layers of the command structure -- from the squad to the office of the
president.
* Failing to understand the political dimension of the war and permitting
political support for the war in the United States to erode by failing to
express a clear, coherent war plan on the broadest level. Because of this
failure, other major failures -- ranging from the failure to find weapons of
mass destruction to the treatment of Iraqi prisoners -- have filled the space
that strategy should have occupied. The persistent failure of the president
to explain the linkage between Iraq and the broader war has been symptomatic
of this systemic failure.
Remember the objective; respect the enemy; be your own worst critic; exercise
leadership at all levels -- these are fundamental principles of warfare. They
have all been violated during the Iraq campaign.
The strategic situation, as of March 2004, was rapidly improving for the
United States. There was serious, reasonable discussion of a final push into
Pakistan to liquidate al Qaeda's leadership. Al Qaeda began a global
counterattack -- as in Spain -- that was neither unexpected nor as effective
as it might have been. However, the counterattack in Iraq was both unexpected
and destabilizing -- causing military and political processes in Iraq to
separate out, and forcing the United States into negotiations with the Sunni
guerrillas while simultaneously trying to manage a crisis in the Shiite
areas. At the same time that the United States was struggling to stabilize
its position in Iraq, the prison abuse issue emerged. It was devastating not
only in its own right, but also because of the timing. It generated a sense
that U.S. operations in Iraq were out of control. From Al Fallujah to An
Najaf to Abu Ghraib, the question was whether anyone had the slightest idea
what they were trying to achieve in Iraq.
Which brings us back to the razor's edge. If the United States rapidly
adjusts its Iraq operations to take realities in that country into account,
rather than engaging on ongoing wishful thinking, the situation in Iraq can
be saved and with it the gains made in the war on al Qaeda. On the other
hand, if the United States continues its unbalanced and ineffective
prosecution of the war against the guerrillas and continues to allow its
relations with the Shia to deteriorate, the United States will find itself in
an untenable position. If it is forced to withdraw from Iraq, or to so limit
its operations there as to be effectively withdrawn, the entire dynamic that
the United States has worked to create since the Sept. 11 attacks will
reverse itself, and the U.S. position in the Muslim world -- which was fairly
strong in January 2004 -- will deteriorate, and al Qaeda's influence will
increase dramatically.
The Political Crisis
It is not clear that the Bush administration understands the crisis it is
facing. The prison abuse pictures are symptomatic -- not only of persistent
command failure, but also of the administration's loss of credibility with
the public. Since no one really knows what the administration is doing, it is
not unreasonable to fill in the blanks with the least generous assumptions.
The issue is this: Iraq has not gone as planned by any stretch of the
imagination. If the failures of Iraq are not rectified quickly, the entire
U.S. strategic position could unravel. Speed is of the essence. There is no
longer time left.
The issue is one of responsibility. Who is responsible for the failures in
Iraq? The president appears to have assumed that if anyone were fired, it
would be admitting that something went wrong. At this point, there is no one
who doesn't know that many things have gone wrong. If the president insists
on retaining all of his senior staff, Cabinet members and field commanders,
no one is going to draw the conclusion that everything is under control;
rather they will conclude that it is the president himself who is responsible
for the failures, and they will act accordingly.
The issue facing Bush is not merely the prison pictures. It is the series of
failures in the Iraq campaign that have revealed serious errors of judgment
and temperament among senior Cabinet-level officials. We suspect that Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is finished, and with him Deputy Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz. Vice President Dick Cheney said over the weekend that everyone
should get off of Rumsfeld's case. What Cheney doesn't seem to grasp is that
there is a war on and that at this moment, it isn't going very well. If the
secretary of defense doesn't bear the burden of failures and misjudgments,
who does? Or does the vice president suggest a no-fault policy when it comes
to war? Or does he think that things are going well?
This is not asked polemically. It is our job to identify emerging trends, and
we have, frequently, been accused of everything from being owned by the
Republicans to being Iraq campaign apologists. In fact, we are making a non-
partisan point: The administration is painting itself into a corner that will
cost Bush the presidency if it does not deal with the fact that there is no
one who doesn't know that Iraq has been mismanaged. The administration's only
option for survival is to start managing it effectively, if that can be done
at this point.
You have to love this one. Just received from a friend.
*****************
>>>> Originator unknown;
>>> As some of you may know, one of my sons serves in the military. He is still stateside, here in California. He called me yesterday to let me know how warm and welcoming people were to him, and his troops, everywhere he goes, telling me how people shake their hands, and thank them for being willing to serve, and fight, for not only our own freedoms but so that others may have them also.
But he also told me about an incident in the grocery store he stopped at yesterday, on his way home from the base. He said that ahead of several people in front of him stood a woman dressed in a burkha.
He said when she got to the cashier she loudly remarked about the US flag lapel pin the cashier wore on her smock. The cashier reached up and
touched the pin, and said proudly, "yes, I always wear it and I probably always will". The woman in the burkha then asked the cashier when she was going to stop bombing her countrymen, explaining that she was Iraqi.
A gentleman standing behind my son stepped forward, putting his arm around my son's shoulders, and nodding towards my son, said in a
calm and gentle voice to the Iraqi woman: "Lady, hundreds of thousands of men and women like this young man have fought and died so that YOU could stand here, in MY country and accuse a check-out cashier of bombing YOUR countrymen. It is my belief that had you been this outspoken in YOUR own country, we wouldn't need to be there today. But, hey, if you have now learned how to speak out so loudly and clearly, I'll gladly buy you a ticket and pay your way back to Iraq so you can straighten out the mess in YOUR country that you
are obviously here in MY country to avoid".
Everyone within hearing distance cheered.
... When the people with first hand knowledge tells the world they could not find, nor do they think, Saddam had WMDs, we must trust them to be telling the truth ... .
The U.S. turn to the United Nations for help in Iraq raises two questions, one of perception, the other of substance.
There can be no doubt that this appeal, in the context of the events in Fallujah, will be perceived in many circles in the Middle East -- and not only in the Middle East -- as signifying fear and flight, in other words, as the beginning of a scuttle. It is now clear that what happened in Fallujah in March was a carefully staged replay of what happened in Somalia in October 1993, when American soldiers were seized, lynched, dismembered and dragged through the streets.
This was intended to achieve the same result -- a precipitous American departure. The line that Americans are degenerate, soft and pampered -- "hit them and they will run" -- has been a major theme of Islamic terrorists for some time now. It was temporarily silenced by the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, but then revived by what was seen as public dithering and wavering. The turn to the U.N. will be perceived, or at least presented, as final and conclusive evidence of their view of America, and may well serve as the starting point of a new wave of terrorist action against Americans, reaching far beyond Iraq and perhaps even as far as these shores. One is reminded of Ehud Barak's decision to withdraw the Israeli forces from Lebanon. The decision was right and indeed long overdue, but the manner of the withdrawal was disastrous, and led directly to the current Intifada. I remember a conversation in an Arab country at the time, when I was told triumphantly: "The Israelis have become soft and pampered, like their American patrons. Our Lebanese brothers have shown us the way." Perceptions, even if inaccurate, are powerful and important, and may at times be self-fulfilling.
The second point is one of substance. The record of the U.N. in dealing with conflicts is not encouraging -- neither in terms of fairness, nor of efficacy. Its record on human rights is even worse -- hardly surprising, since the members of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights include such practitioners of human rights as Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. In dealing with conflicts, as a European observer once remarked, its purpose seems to be conservation rather than resolution.
* * *
A case in point: In 1947 the British Empire in India was partitioned into two states, India and Pakistan. There was a bitter military struggle, and an estimated 10 million refugees were displaced. Despite continuing friction, some sort of accommodation was reached between the two states and the refugees were resettled. No outside power or organization was involved.
In the following year, 1948, the British-mandated territory of Palestine was partitioned -- in terms of area and numbers, a triviality compared with India. Yet that conflict continues, and the 750,000 Arab refugees from Israel and their millions of descendants remain refugees, in camps maintained and staffed by the U.N. Except for Jordan, no Arab state has been willing to grant citizenship to the Palestinian refugees or to their locally born descendants, or even to allow them the rights of resident aliens. They are now entering their fifth generation as stateless refugee aliens. The whole operation is maintained and sustained by a massive apparatus of U.N. officials, some of whom have spent virtually their whole careers on this issue. What progress has been made on the Arab-Israel problem -- the resettlement in Israel of Jewish refugees from the Arab-held parts of mandatory Palestine and from Arab countries, the Egyptian and Jordanian peace agreements -- was ach! ieved outside the framework of the U.N. One shudders to think what might have been the fate of the Indian subcontinent if the U.N. had been involved in its partition.
The question of substance is of course of far greater importance in the long term. The question of perception is immediate, but could have long-term consequences.
Mr. Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, is the author of "From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East," just out from Oxford.
Atrocities in Iraq: 'I killed innocent people for our government'
By Paul Rockwell -- Special to The Bee
Published 2:15 am PDT Sunday, May 16, 2004
"We forget what war is about, what it does to those who wage it and those who suffer from it. Those who hate war the most, I have often found, are veterans who know it."
- Chris Hedges, New York Times reporter and author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
For nearly 12 years, Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey was a hard-core, some say gung-ho, Marine. For three years he trained fellow Marines in one of the most grueling indoctrination rituals in military life - Marine boot camp.
The Iraq war changed Massey. The brutality, the sheer carnage of the U.S. invasion, touched his conscience and transformed him forever. He was honorably discharged with full severance last Dec. 31 and is now back in his hometown, Waynsville, N.C.
When I talked with Massey last week, he expressed his remorse at the civilian loss of life in incidents in which he himself was involved.
Q: You spent 12 years in the Marines. When were you sent to Iraq?
A: I went to Kuwait around Jan. 17. I was in Iraq from the get-go. And I was involved in the initial invasion.
Q: What does the public need to know about your experiences as a Marine?
A: The cause of the Iraqi revolt against the American occupation. What they need to know is we killed a lot of innocent people. I think at first the Iraqis had the understanding that casualties are a part of war. But over the course of time, the occupation hurt the Iraqis. And I didn't see any humanitarian support.
Q: What experiences turned you against the war and made you leave the Marines?
A: I was in charge of a platoon that consists of machine gunners and missile men. Our job was to go into certain areas of the towns and secure the roadways. There was this one particular incident - and there's many more - the one that really pushed me over the edge. It involved a car with Iraqi civilians. From all the intelligence reports we were getting, the cars were loaded down with suicide bombs or material. That's the rhetoric we received from intelligence. They came upon our checkpoint. We fired some warning shots. They didn't slow down. So we lit them up.
Q: Lit up? You mean you fired machine guns?
A: Right. Every car that we lit up we were expecting ammunition to go off. But we never heard any. Well, this particular vehicle we didn't destroy completely, and one gentleman looked up at me and said: "Why did you kill my brother? We didn't do anything wrong." That hit me like a ton of bricks.
Q: He spoke English?
A: Oh, yeah.
Q: Baghdad was being bombed. The civilians were trying to get out, right?
A: Yes. They received pamphlets, propaganda we dropped on them. It said, "Just throw up your hands, lay down weapons." That's what they were doing, but we were still lighting them up. They weren't in uniform. We never found any weapons.
Q: You got to see the bodies and casualties?
A: Yeah, firsthand. I helped throw them in a ditch.
Q: Over what period did all this take place?
A: During the invasion of Baghdad.
'We lit him up pretty good'
Q: How many times were you involved in checkpoint "light-ups"?
A: Five times. There was [the city of] Rekha. The gentleman was driving a stolen work utility van. He didn't stop. With us being trigger happy, we didn't really give this guy much of a chance. We lit him up pretty good. Then we inspected the back of the van. We found nothing. No explosives.
Q: The reports said the cars were loaded with explosives. In all the incidents did you find that to be the case?
A: Never. Not once. There were no secondary explosions. As a matter of fact, we lit up a rally after we heard a stray gunshot.
Q: A demonstration? Where?
A: On the outskirts of Baghdad. Near a military compound. There were demonstrators at the end of the street. They were young and they had no weapons. And when we rolled onto the scene, there was already a tank that was parked on the side of the road. If the Iraqis wanted to do something, they could have blown up the tank. But they didn't. They were only holding a demonstration. Down at the end of the road, we saw some RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) lined up against the wall. That put us at ease because we thought: "Wow, if they were going to blow us up, they would have done it."
Q: Were the protest signs in English or Arabic?
A: Both.
Q: Who gave the order to wipe the demonstrators out?
A: Higher command. We were told to be on the lookout for the civilians because a lot of the Fedayeen and the Republican Guards had tossed away uniforms and put on civilian clothes and were mounting terrorist attacks on American soldiers. The intelligence reports that were given to us were basically known by every member of the chain of command. The rank structure that was implemented in Iraq by the chain of command was evident to every Marine in Iraq. The order to shoot the demonstrators, I believe, came from senior government officials, including intelligence communities within the military and the U.S. government.
Q: What kind of firepower was employed?
A: M-16s, 50-cal. machine guns.
Q: You fired into six or ten kids? Were they all taken out?
A: Oh, yeah. Well, I had a "mercy" on one guy. When we rolled up, he was hiding behind a concrete pillar. I saw him and raised my weapon up, and he put up his hands. He ran off. I told everybody, "Don't shoot." Half of his foot was trailing behind him. So he was running with half of his foot cut off.
Q: After you lit up the demonstration, how long before the next incident?
A: Probably about one or two hours. This is another thing, too. I am so glad I am talking with you, because I suppressed all of this.
Q: Well, I appreciate you giving me the information, as hard as it must be to recall the painful details.
A: That's all right. It's kind of therapy for me. Because it's something that I had repressed for a long time.
Q: And the incident?
A: There was an incident with one of the cars. We shot an individual with his hands up. He got out of the car. He was badly shot. We lit him up. I don't know who started shooting first. One of the Marines came running over to where we were and said: "You all just shot a guy with his hands up." Man, I forgot about this.
Depleted uranium and cluster bombs
Q: You mention machine guns. What can you tell me about cluster bombs, or depleted uranium?
A: Depleted uranium. I know what it does. It's basically like leaving plutonium rods around. I'm 32 years old. I have 80 percent of my lung capacity. I ache all the time. I don't feel like a healthy 32-year-old.
Q: Were you in the vicinity of of depleted uranium?
A: Oh, yeah. It's everywhere. DU is everywhere on the battlefield. If you hit a tank, there's dust.
Q: Did you breath any dust?
A: Yeah.
Q: And if DU is affecting you or our troops, it's impacting Iraqi civilians.
A: Oh, yeah. They got a big wasteland problem.
Q: Do Marines have any precautions about dealing with DU?
A: Not that I know of. Well, if a tank gets hit, crews are detained for a little while to make sure there are no signs or symptoms. American tanks have depleted uranium on the sides, and the projectiles have DU in them. If an enemy vehicle gets hit, the area gets contaminated. Dead rounds are in the ground. The civilian populace is just now starting to learn about it. Hell, I didn't even know about DU until two years ago. You know how I found out about it? I read an article in Rolling Stone magazine. I just started inquiring about it, and I said "Holy s---!"
Q: Cluster bombs are also controversial. U.N. commissions have called for a ban. Were you acquainted with cluster bombs?
A: I had one of my Marines in my battalion who lost his leg from an ICBM.
Q: What's an ICBM?
A: A multi-purpose cluster bomb.
Q: What happened?
A: He stepped on it. We didn't get to training about clusters until about a month before I left.
Q: What kind of training?
A: They told us what they looked like, and not to step on them.
Q: Were you in any areas where they were dropped?
A: Oh, yeah. They were everywhere.
Q: Dropped from the air?
A: From the air as well as artillery.
Q: Are they dropped far away from cities, or inside the cities?
A: They are used everywhere. Now if you talked to a Marine artillery officer, he would give you the runaround, the politically correct answer. But for an average grunt, they're everywhere.
Q: Including inside the towns and cities?
A: Yes, if you were going into a city, you knew there were going to be ICBMs.
Q: Cluster bombs are anti-personnel weapons. They are not precise. They don't injure buildings, or hurt tanks. Only people and living things. There are a lot of undetonated duds and they go off after the battles are over.
A: Once the round leaves the tube, the cluster bomb has a mind of its own. There's always human error. I'm going to tell you: The armed forces are in a tight spot over there. It's starting to leak out about the civilian casualties that are taking place. The Iraqis know. I keep hearing reports from my Marine buddies inside that there were 200-something civilians killed in Fallujah. The military is scrambling right now to keep the raps on that. My understanding is Fallujah is just littered with civilian bodies.
Embedded reporters
Q: How are the embedded reporters responding?
A: I had embedded reporters in my unit, not my platoon. One we had was a South African reporter. He was scared s---less. We had an incident where one of them wanted to go home.
Q: Why?
A: It was when we started going into Baghdad. When he started seeing the civilian casualties, he started wigging out a little bit. It didn't start until we got on the outskirts of Baghdad and started taking civilian casualties.
Q: I would like to go back to the first incident, when the survivor asked why did you kill his brother. Was that the incident that pushed you over the edge, as you put it?
A: Oh, yeah. Later on I found out that was a typical day. I talked with my commanding officer after the incident. He came up to me and says: "Are you OK?" I said: "No, today is not a good day. We killed a bunch of civilians." He goes: "No, today was a good day." And when he said that, I said "Oh, my goodness, what the hell am I into?"
Q: Your feelings changed during the invasion. What was your state of mind before the invasion?
A: I was like every other troop. My president told me they got weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam threatened the free world, that he had all this might and could reach us anywhere. I just bought into the whole thing.
Q: What changed you?
A: The civilian casualties taking place. That was what made the difference. That was when I changed.
Q: Did the revelations that the government fabricated the evidence for war affect the troops?
A: Yes. I killed innocent people for our government. For what? What did I do? Where is the good coming out of it? I feel like I've had a hand in some sort of evil lie at the hands of our government. I just feel embarrassed, ashamed about it.
Showdown with superiors
Q: I understand that all the incidents - killing civilians at checkpoints, itchy fingers at the rally - weigh on you. What happened with your commanding officers? How did you deal with them?
A: There was an incident. It was right after the fall of Baghdad, when we went back down south. On the outskirts of Karbala, we had a morning meeting on the battle plan. I was not in a good mindset. All these things were going through my head - about what we were doing over there. About some of the things my troops were asking. I was holding it all inside. My lieutenant and I got into a conversation. The conversation was striking me wrong. And I lashed out. I looked at him and told him: "You know, I honestly feel that what we're doing is wrong over here. We're committing genocide."
He asked me something and I said that with the killing of civilians and the depleted uranium we're leaving over here, we're not going to have to worry about terrorists. He didn't like that. He got up and stormed off. And I knew right then and there that my career was over. I was talking to my commanding officer.
Q: What happened then?
A: After I talked to the top commander, I was kind of scurried away. I was basically put on house arrest. I didn't talk to other troops. I didn't want to hurt them. I didn't want to jeopardize them.
I want to help people. I felt strongly about it. I had to say something. When I was sent back to stateside, I went in front of the sergeant major. He's in charge of 3,500-plus Marines. "Sir," I told him, "I don't want your money. I don't want your benefits. What you did was wrong."
It was just a personal conviction with me. I've had an impeccable career. I chose to get out. And you know who I blame? I blame the president of the U.S. It's not the grunt. I blame the president because he said they had weapons of mass destruction. It was a lie.
