It must get tedious for the average blogger to be trumped in the Iraq debate by members of the House and Senate who just got back from Iraq. They just returned from meeting with the leaders of the Iraqi government, with our top generals and our troops, and with lots of other really smart, important people over there.
So what are you basing your opinion on, what you see on television? Their judgment is obviously based upon vastly superior information. So events have proven them wrong and you right at every step of the way, who’s ever heard of a blogger with gravitas?
Actually, I’ve visited Iraq twice as part of congressional delegations. Other members have been more often and more recently, but I have a pretty good idea from my two visits what they saw and heard. And I know that what members conclude from their visits to Iraq probably tells us more about them than it does about what they saw and heard, as kos observed here last week.
I first visited Iraq for three days, from October 30 to November 1, 2003, six months after President Bush stood under the banner that read "Mission Accomplished" and proclaimed that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended," and the United States and our allies had "prevailed."
President Bush said that there was still "difficult work to do in Iraq," including "bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous." Donald Rumsfeld described the continuing violence in Iraq as no worse than the violence in any big city, however. According to Rumsfeld, our forces "have the sympathy of the population, not the surviving elements" of the Hussein regime, the "pockets of dead-enders" who were causing the problems.
I gave a sleep-deprived interview to North Carolina public television almost as soon as I got home from that first trip. I thought Iraq was more than just a tough neighborhood:
Interviewer: When you arrived in Iraq what was your initial reaction?
Me: It’s obviously a war zone. Our delegation—there were six members of Congress who went—we traveled everywhere in a convoy. The first vehicle was a truck with equipment which was used to jam the radio signals used to explode the roadside bombs. The military term is "IED," "improvised explosive devices." The next couple of vehicles would be armored Humvees with soldiers manning the 50-caliber machine guns. We would ride in armored SUVs. There would be one or two other SUVs with us with, again, soldiers with high-caliber automatic weapons who were scouring the road and surrounding area. And then behind us another armored Humvee and above us a couple of Apache helicopters. It was hard to sit in the middle of that kind of security and think "hey, this is going great."
Public support for our involvement in Iraq was still strong, and the briefings with our officials were pretty candid. They thought the "sympathy of the population" had definite limits:
Interviewer: Representative Miller, what do you see as the status of reconstruction and security efforts in Iraq?
Me: I think we have a tough road in front of us....We heard two versions of what might happen if things go on the way they are. One was that if we stay, we make it clear that we are going to stay and ultimately the Iraqi people will tire of being in a war and will turn on those that are fighting us and begin to give them up to us and oppose those who are fighting the guerilla war. The other version we got from Paul Bremer and Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who is the British equivalent of Paul Bremer involved in reconstruction, was this is a very nationalistic society, one official described it as a "xenophobic" society, and we are foreigners in that society. The Iraqis now have mixed feelings. They understand the need for us to be there, at least for a while, to establish some kind of order or to keep order. But the longer we are there the greater the resentment will be of our being there, of foreigners being on Iraqi soil, occupying their country, and we have a year or two perhaps to accomplish what it is we can accomplish. Then we really need to be out of there.
The latter view — we needed to be gone in a year or two—was the predominant view. The former view — that we needed to prove to the Iraqis that we were going to be around a while for the Iraqis to cooperate—was the view of one general, Ray Odierno.
Odierno was then commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, with headquarters in Hussein’s former palace in Tikrit. I asked how the insurgent Iraqis, the "dead-enders," could operate without the support of the Iraqi people. And I asked especially how "foreign fighters" could operate without Iraqis giving them sanctuary. Foreigners couldn’t just take a bus to Fallujah and stay at the Day’s Inn. Dozens of Iraqis must know where every "foreign fighter" was staying, and yet we got little information on their whereabouts. What did that tell us about the sympathy of the Iraqis?
There were other hints of isolation of our military from the Iraqi people in our discussion with Odierno and his staff. They said one of their biggest needs was Arabic translators they could trust. Our troops often understood enough Arabic to know that their Iraqi translator was lying to them.
The conversations in that first visit were odd because of obvious gaps in vocabulary. We didn't have an agreed term for what was happening in Iraq, or for who was doing it. I called Iraq a "war zone" when I got back to North Carolina, but the people we talked with in Iraq did not use the word "war." According to Bob Woodward, the Bush Admininstration forbad the use of the terms "insurgency" or "insurgents" during that period. A Republican member of our delegation, at one point, angrily insisted that we call the people attacking our troops "terrorists," because that's what they are, he said. Actually, the definition of terrorism is in dispute, but calling an attack on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle "terrorism" required a broad definition, making "terrorist" just a pejorative word for "enemy."
On our way home from Iraq, we visited our injured in the military hospital at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. They just called the people who injured them "Iraqis."
The members of our delegation spoke very little with each other about what our impressions were. But we overheard each other's calls home to our local press from the "delegation room" in our hotel in Kuwait (we did not stay overnight in Iraq). The visit to Iraq that I heard the Republicans describe didn't sound like the same one I was on.
On the first day of our visit, one of our military escorts asked if there was anything we particularly wanted to see while we were there. Yes, the Republicans said, they wanted to see "Saddam's torture chambers." So on the second day, we traveled by armored convoy to a prison outside of Baghdad. We got a tour, complete with descriptions of the torture and execution of political dissidents during the Hussein regime that had occurred there. I didn't doubt any of what we were told, but you couldn't tell it just by a tour. There was none of the melodrama of the Wax Museum's Chamber of Horrors. It just looked like a prison.
That night I overheard the Republicans in their calls to their local press describe the "grisly sight" of the "torture chambers."
The second visit was for two days, on September 30 and October 1, 2005. Public support for the war had waned dramatically, and with it the candor of our briefings from the political officials there. We were briefed by a deputy ambassador who never varied from the script, regardless of our questions.
Our military briefings were more candid. No, we were still not getting enough "actionable intelligence" from the Iraqi people on who and where the insurgents were. Yes, it was still a big problem
And it was hard to miss the fact that security had deteriorated since my first visit. We visited nothing outside the wires of secure compounds--the Green Zone, Camp Victory at Baghdad International Airport, and Balad Air Base. We traveled between compounds on helicopters flying very fast and very low to avoid shoulder-fired missiles and small arms fire, and we wore body armor and helmets.
One thing I noticed even from the helicopter, however, was that the presence of our military in Baghdad did not seem as overwhelming as it had on my first visit. An officer giving one of our military briefings explained that was the result of a deliberate decision to reduce the visible presence of our military in Baghdad. The more visible the presence of our military in Baghdad, the officer said, the greater resentment of our armed forces as an occupying power. We were instead "reducing the footprint" of our military in Iraq, and putting the Iraqi military and police, not the American military, into direct contact with the Iraqi people, especially in Baghdad.
General Odierno has gained a star since he met with our delegation three years ago (he was a Major General, now he’s a Lieutenant General) and is back in Iraq after a stint as military adviser to Condoleezza Rice. He is the new operational commander in Iraq. He will rank second once General David Petraeus arrives to take command. Odierno will oversee the plan to deploy additional troops to Baghdad, but told the New York Times that it might take "two or three years" before American and Iraqi forces can "gain the upper hand" even with the additional forces.
So three years ago I heard from our officials in charge of the reconstruction of Iraq that "we have a year or two perhaps to accomplish what it is we can accomplish. Then we really need to be out of there." Now we face another two or three years to "gain the upper hand."
And more than a year after I heard that we were deliberately "reducing the footprint" of our military to lessen the resentment of our presence by the Iraqi people, we are now increasing the presence of our military in Iraq.
I don’t know what the Republicans on that first trip to Iraq say now about that trip. For a while they probably told the story of visiting the prison outside of Baghdad where the Hussein regime had tortured and executed political opponents. They probably don’t tell that story any more.
The prison was Abu Ghraib.