JOHN PAUL VANN: U.S. Army, American Hero & How to Win Sub-National Conflicts UPDATED 22 March 2012 John Paul Vann: American Hero VIDEO! A lot of people wail that the age of heroes is long gone. 'The Age of heroes is not past.

So long as there remains ONE MAN who contributes to sustain the weak, mold the characters of the young and bring hope to the lives of the needy.' ONE SUCH MAN WAS JOHN PAUL VANN. We strongly encourage you to read the best book yet written on the Vietnam war, by Neil Sheehan and learn about this great human being.

John Paul Vann was a 'mini-model' of America in her two Asian wars, travel with him as a young U.S. Army officer he leads by example and personally drops ammunition from a small plane to troops surrounded by the enemy in the Korean War. SUB-NATIONAL CONFLICT #1: VIETNAM, THE BATTLE OF AP BAC Follow him later as a LieuTenant Colonel (LTC), he advises the South Vietnamese Army at the 1963, (scroll down after going to the link) again from a L-19 (O-1 Bird Dog) observation plane where a pair of errors gives the VC their first victory against the U.S. War machines: the VC are operating a radio which a locates; rather than run or disperse, the Viet Cong (VC) decide to stand and fight. One of the easy-to-maintain, inexpensive fixed-wing STOL aircraft the U.S. Army used to operate before the corrupted Army Aviation into its own branch off into their own little world PLAN A: what we wanted to do and where we expected the enemy to be: Attack on Ap Tan Thoi village where the transmittor was located 1/11th ARVN foot infantry flying by H-21 ' Flying Banana' helicopters would land in the open rice paddies and converge on the enemy transmitter at Tan Thoi. Unfortunately, the U.S.

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Pilots flying the carrying the ARVN troops land within effective small-arms range (300 meters) of the dug-in VC despite Vann's radio instructions from the L-19 not to make that the (LZ). VANN'S VIEW OF THE LZ Vann can clearly see from his L-19 that they are landing too close to the treeline, but the don't heed his directions to land farther away. ENEMY'S VIEW OF THE LZ The picture above shows what the Viet Cong rebels saw as the H-21s landed; notice the Thompson.45 sub machine gun in the VC's hands.they opened fire concentrating in the exposed pilot's clear canopy area, killing several Americans and disabling 5 helicopters. PLAN B: Vann orders 4/2 ARVN M113 commander, Ba to hurry up and drive to where the downed foot infantry force is clinging to its life and assault the VC in the treeline to the east.

Ba is reluctant to use his M113s too aggressively as the President of South Vietnam, Diem expects him to use these armored vehicles to. Ba takes his sweet ass time to get to the scene. With the helos shot to pieces, ARVN and American advisors wounded and dying, LTC Vann returns to base, gets in yet another (Like Rommel and Patton, he knew how to fly) to spur the reluctant ARVN M113 commander to save the day and seize victory from the 'jaws' of defeat. What Vann saw from the air from his O-1 Bird Dog However, the M113 force takes too long to get there by not having to cross rice paddy dikes. Ba's light tracked Armored Fighting Vehicles (AFVs) do not have gun shields to protect their track commanders (TCs) manning their.50 caliber Heavy Machine Guns. Thus, when the M113s arrive, the VC concentrate fire on the exposed TCs and they are turned back.

PLAN C: Vann flies back to base undaunted and gets the South Vietnamese Paratroopers ready to drop while he flies over with an American pilot in a borrowed L-19 to draw enemy fire and call in B-26 Invader air strikes. He will have the ARVN Paratroops drop EAST of the enemy positions to block their retreat and gain a victory. From 'A Bright Shining Lie' page 258: Vann asked Porter to have Cao drop the paratroops in the rice fields and swamp land on the east side of Tan Thoi and Bac, the one open flank that the guerrilla battalion commander could not retreat across during the day, but that would become the logical escape route after dark.

However, ARVN Paratroop commander Cao does not want to fight the VC, just land safely behind the Civil Guards and M113s as a ' show-of-force'. Sheehan continues: 'Topper Six, I've already told him to do that and he says he's going to employ them on the other side,' Porter replied. 'I'll be right there, sir,' Vann said, and instructed the pilot to return to the airstrip as fast as possible. He knew instantly what Cao's game was. As he was to put it in his after-action report for Harkins, Cao intended to use the airborne battalion not to trap and annihilate the Viet Cong but rather ' as a show-of-force.in hopes that the VC units would disengage and the unwanted battle would be over.' Vann clambered out of the little plane and strode into the command-post tent. He told Cao that on this day he could not spend all of this blood for nothing.

He had to close the box around the guerrillas and destroy them. Porter supported him, both of them arguing that Cao had no choice as a responsible commander. 'You have got to drop the over there,' Vann said, poking his finger at the big operations map where it showed the open flank on the east side of the two hamlets. He became so angry and was jabbing so hard at the map that he almost toppled over the easel on which it rested. Cao would have none of this Soldier's logic. ' It is not prudent, it is not prudent,' he kept replying. It was better, he said, to drop the Paratroops on the west behind the M113s and the Civil Guards where they could tie-in with these other units.

' We must reinforce,' he said. Vann was later to sum up Cao's logic with the tart remark: ' They chose to reinforce defeat.' He lost his temper one more time. ' Goddammit,' he shouted, ' you want them to get away. You're afraid to fight.

You know they'll sneak out this way and that's exactly what you want.' Embarrassed at being driven into a corner, Cao pulled a on Vann, the lieutenant colonel.

' I am the commanding general and it is my decision,' he said. Tran Thien Khiem, the chief of staff of the Joint General Staff, who had flown down from Saigon at Cao's request and was present during the argument, did not object. Harkins had not come down to find out why an unprecedented five helicopters had been lost, nor had any of his subordinates appeared, so there was no American general in the tent to brandish his stars for Vann and Porter. Cao then attempted to mollify Vann by pretending to move up the drop time. He said, ' We will drop at sixteen hundred hours'-4:00 P.M. Civilian time.

Knowing that it was useless to argue further and hoping that he might at least get a Paratroop battalion early enough to be of some use, Vann went back to his spotter plane. He spent the rest of the afternoon asking when the Paratroops were going to arrive and attempting to persuade Cao and Dam and Tho to turn what was about to become the biggest defeat of the war so far into its biggest victory. They still had the opportunity to redeem the day. All they had to do was to pull the two Civil Guard battalions and Ba's company together for a combined attack on Bac. As demoralized as Ba's men were, they could have at least supported the Civil Guards with their.50 calibers, and the guerrillas could not have withstood the total force. Neither Cao nor Tho, who were the men in control, could see that the sensible and moral course was to press ahead and accept the further and proportionately minor casualties that would be necessary to give meaning to the sacrifice of those who had already been killed and maimed.

If Vann had been commanding U.S. Paratroops he could have ordered them to drop behind the VC and even went up in his Bird Dog plane and personally guided the USAF C-123 transports to the proper (DZ). Since Vann was an ' advisor' he can't make the ARVN fight and win if they didn't want to. However, either the American C-123 flight leader or the ARVN Jumpmasters, initiated the drop on the west of Ap Bac too late instead of having green light begin at the southernmost beginning of the DZ; the ARVN Paratroopers landed too far north and west; in effective small arms-fire range of the VC at Tan Thoi, resulting in the two American 'Red Hat' advisers getting wounded and a dozen of their men killed. Night fell and the VC escaped. Paratroops dropped but inside forward line of troops instead of behind enemy route of retreat The VC won despite their outnumbered odds because non-motivated ARVN officers refuse to launch a timely parachute assault to the VC's rear to trap them from escaping.

Now have gunshields for the TCs IF commanders are combat-oriented and not bogged down with to order them.Iraqi Freedom's only Congressional Medal of Honor winner, SFC Paul Smith died in a M113A3 Gavin WITHOUT a gunshield kit; a hero who died needlessly from an U.S. Army and marine bureaucracies that don't even know their own history or studies the profession of arms.Look how long it took for to get back on top of vehicles after Soldiers began dying in Iraq in 2003! After Ap Bac, gunshields were placed on M113s like this modern A3 model has: The loss at Ap Bac in 1963, emboldens the VC and the ARVN are routed continually thereafter when they try to fight the VC/NVA ' even' rifle vs. Rifle on foot; LTC Vann's Army career is destroyed as he is made the ' fall guy' for ARVN corruption and incompetence. The ARVN that wanted to fight effectively create the gunshielded M113 'ACAV' and their light mechanized infantry forces, though a minority---are the only. The situation deteriorates and this leads to the full-scale U.S. Troop landings to fight off the VC from over-throwing the South, particularly the deployment of better -trained U.S.

Army 1 st Air Cavalry Division troopers to prevent the nation being cut into two in the central highlands. Maneuver Air Support Video: in praise of the O-1 Bird Dog Unfortunately, America today has. What a travesty. Thank the fighter-bomber and rotor-head egomaniacs. 'Men don't follow titles.

They follow COURAGE.' Mel Gibson as Freedom fighter, William Wallace in the film, What is so AWESOME about LTC Vann, is he doesn't give up! He makes countless briefings to those in power at the Pentagon to win the ' hearts and minds' of the Vietnamese people, reform the South Vietnamese Army/government and not over-rely on refighting WWII in the rice paddies. The recent film adaptation of Sheehan's book, does a wonderful job of showing this.

He becomes a civilian AID worker and he then goes about taking apart the VC infrastructure in the villages by Civic Action and fighting corruption. Vann networks---finds allies and leading-by-example makes it happen.

After the gamble decimates the VC to nothing, the provinces are secure, though back home in America public support for the war has collapsed. Now for the Communists to win, The North Vietnamese Army (NVA); an external nation-state foe will have to invade.

The Army and marine generals now had a 'WW2' type fight they longed for. Be careful for what you wish for.their Before the 1975 collapse, in his finest hour, Vann gets in a helicopter and single-handedly directs air strikes and U.S. Military/ARVN forces to repel the 1972 NVA invasion. One man can and did make a difference! NVA General Ngo Giap, victor at Dien Bien Phu, arguably one of THE greatest military generals of all time--no slouch himself, gets fired for this failure! Sadly, Vann dies shortly thereafter in a helicopter crash.

The state funeral he has opens Neil Shehann's AWESOME book which Oliver Stone should. Our conjecture is that had Vann lived, the South would not have been lost to the Communists in 1975. He would have seen to it that people in Washington D.C. And the Pentagon would have not thrown away our hard-won victories in Vietnam. His loss was the turning point in the Vietnam War. He would have found a way to win because he was a PROFESSIONAL--not a bureaucrat.

JOHN PAUL VANN AS A METAPHOR FOR U.S. INVOLVEMENT IN VIETNAM? Neil Sheehan in an describing how he wrote his book said: After all of this experience, both there and here, you chose this Colonel to focus on as a metaphor for American involvement. Why that choice? 'It was an accident to begin with. John Vann was my friend, I had known him in those three years I'd been in Vietnam and I'd see him periodically afterwards. When he was killed, I went to his funeral at Arlington in 1972, and it was like an extraordinary class reunion.

Here were all the figures of Vietnam in this chapel. This man had left the army as a, had gone back to Vietnam as a civilian, and ended the war holding a General's position even though he was a civilian. Was his chief pallbearer, and a few minutes before the ceremony started, Edward Kennedy, the last of the Kennedy brothers, came in.

And I thought of the older brother who sent the country to fight this war in Vietnam in '62 when I first went there, already buried in this cemetery, and here was the youngest brother coming. He was a friend of Vann's.

Sitting with the family was, who was about to go on trial for copying the Pentagon Papers. He and Vann had remained best friends, despite going in totally opposite directions on the war. It was very moving. I realized that we were burying more than John Vann. We were burying the whole era of the war. We were burying the era of boundless self-confidence that led us to Vietnam.

By that time, John had come to personify the war. He'd spent the better part of ten years there.

Everyone else would go for a year or two, three at the most, and he'd spent the better part of ten. And I realized that if I wrote a book about him, I could write a history of the war. I could put the two together, and people might be able to understand the war because they would be reading about it in human terms, though the story of a man whose life turned out to be like a novel. He had influenced that band of war correspondents who first clued America in to what was going on in Vietnam during the last period of the Kennedy administration. Oh yes, he'd influenced us enormously because his first year in Vietnam was during my first assignment as a reporter and David Halberstam's first American war assignment. Vann had an extraordinary mind.

He had an incredible capacity to relate to human beings. He was a wonderful actor. He could manipulate people. He could sense human issues. At the same time, he had a capacity to deal with hard facts, like statistics.

He was a statistician. Usually those qualities seem to cancel each other out, but they didn't in him.

So in that first year, we were faced with the problem of covering a war where the advisors in the field were telling us we were losing the war. We could see that as well when we went out on operations, which was pretty frequent. The General in Saigon, a man named Paul Harkins, always saw the world through rose-colored glasses and kept seeing it through them. He would maintain we were winning the war. You were caught between the two. It was an adversarial relationship. And Vann helped us to understand the war in a way that other advisors couldn't, because he was fearless.

He would work down on a tactical level, and he could apply what he saw down there at the. He gave us perspectives and information that we didn't get from other advisors. He shaped our reporting because we were trying to come to grips with this ourselves, and this man helped us come to grips with it in a way we wouldn't have been able to without him.' There was a moral outrage in what he was telling you about the war that you wound up conveying to the audience back home in the United States.

'Yes, there was a moral outrage on several levels. First of all, you've got to remember in that period of time, this country was at the of its power. We thought that whatever we wanted to do was right and good, simply because we were Americans, and we would succeed at it because we were Americans. And Vann embodied that, and so did the reporters.

We wanted to see this country win the war just as much as those advisors did. We felt we would help to do that. And so there was the moral outrage over this General and the ambassador in Saigon who kept denying the truth we would see.

I discovered later on that they believed these delusions. We thought they were lying to us; I discovered later on they believed what they were saying. They were really deluded men. And then there was the moral outrage over the way the war was being conducted. Vann had the keen sense of honor as a and he was enraged at the, which was routinely done by the Vietnamese and American Generals. He thought, first of all, this was terrible.

When I say keen as a Soldier, he was in Vietnam to fight other men, not to kill somebody's mother or sister or kid. And he felt that, first of all, this was wrong, and secondly, it was stupid, because it was going to turn the population against us, and of course he was quite right. So a sense of was conveyed on several levels, yes.' You quote him at one time as saying, ' This is a political war, and it calls for the utmost discrimination in killing. The best weapon in killing is a knife.'

You emphasize his criticism of the indiscriminate bombing, which was really the way that we chose to pursue the war. The Generals were fighting another war, they were still fighting World War II, and it made no sense in the Vietnam context. Quantitative attrition/annihilation mentality: 'When I got at the records, I realized that they also understood what they were doing. I mean, they thought that they could -- you know, Mao Zedong described guerrillas as fish swimming in the sea; well, they were going to empty the sea. And the Vietnamese Generals on the Saigon side thought that they could terrify their peasantry into ceasing to support the guerrillas. I think the American Generals, as it turned out later on, deliberately wanted to empty these areas of population'.

JOHN PAUL VANN AS THE MODEL FOR TODAY'S U.S. ARMY LEADER We know one bitter Vietnam vet criticized the book, A Bright Shining Lie, but needs to rethink his position: Vann is the model of the leader we need today who can network and orchestrate a victory on complex, Non-Linear Battlefields (NLBs). 'The Mongols, a classic example of an ancient force that fought according to cyberwar principles, were organized more like a network than a hierarchy.

More recently, a relatively minor military power that defeated a great modern power--the combined forces of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong--operated in many respects more like a network than an institution; it even extended political- support networks abroad. In both cases, the Mongols and the Vietnamese, their defeated opponents were large institutions whose forces were designed to fight set-piece attritional battles. To this may be added a further set of observations drawn from current events. Most adversaries that the United States and its allies face in the realm of low-intensity conflict, such as international terrorists, guerrilla insurgents, drug smuggling cartels, ethnic factions, as well as racial and tribal gangs, are all organized like networks (although their leadership may be quite hierarchical).

Perhaps a reason that military (and police) institutions have difficulty engaging in low-intensity conflicts is because they are not meant to be fought by institutions. The lesson: Institutions can be defeated by networks, and it may take networks to counter networks. The future may belong to whoever masters the network form.' ' by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, International Policy Department RAND These guys are right-on-target at the source of our temporary loss in Vietnam 1975-1991?

However, war is not just a lethal sporting contest among combatants, its about whose IDEAS will dominate, in the case of FREEDOM, in the end the truth has won out over communism. It could have won out sooner at less human cost--had the. In fact, Sheehan returns years later to Vietnam in the book, a review states: 'Sheehan sees a Vietnam suffering not from the American war but from a prolonging of the agony by the rigid regime of Le Duan, with its prosecution of new wars and its Stalinist economics. In 1986, as General Giap relates in a longish and candid interview, came doi moi, or ``the new way.'

' Out went the collective farms and heavy industrial projects; in came a free market. Within a year, Vietnam was exporting rice, and the currency had stabilized. Still, it's a desperately poor country, the North in particular, as Sheehan's tour of hospitals demonstrates: They are under-equipped and cannot afford to stock antibiotics or basic vaccines. In Saigon, Sheehan is overcome with memories and seeks out his and Susan's old haunts, as well as those of John Vann, subject of much of A Bright Shining Lie. Like the North, the South is a society run by party faithful--and the privileges of rank have hearkened to them, leaving out a great many of the ``mutilated.' ' Even so, the armies of homeless have been eliminated, and no one is starving.

In Saigon, Western influence is strongest, ready for the moment when the American embargo drops and Vietnam becomes the economic powerhouse everyone is anticipating. Already the BMWs proliferate.' However, if the forces of freedom were more open-minded and networked like the Vann did while he was alive and the enemy did, we could have won the struggle sooner on the battlefield and not just wait for cultural changes to do it for us. The men who fought in Vietnam need to know that their sacrifices did count-just ask the people of Thailand.

But if we are to learn from our war there, we must not make excuses that the politicians 'did this or that' when there is plenty to do at our own level within the military to, and ', which is what Vann did. We also have thanks to Ben Works of SIRIUS, the British example in ' Imperial Policing' in the 1920s/30s and Malaya in 1950 to see what ' right looks like'. (entire book online) John Paul Vann is one of the greatest American heroes to ever live, America's ' Lawrence of Arabia' in the far instead of middle east; Sheehan's book is a classic, the major fault we have is the 'lie' ending in the title, probably a sop to get anti-war types to read it!

I would change the word to ' Hope' that was lost that we need to rekindle by reading this fine book. Webster should contact Sheehan and have him write a sequel book to ABSL on the ' missing' period of Vann's Vietnam adventures when he was Mr.

Congressman Charlie Wilson was to Afghanistan what Vann was to Vietnam; but note both men did not get the chance to do the job right. Which is why we need a specialized Sub-National Conflict Stability Corps so the milbureaucracy doesn't racketeer and both SNCs.

SUB-NATIONAL CONFLICT #2: IRAQ, JOHN PAUL VANN COIN TECHNIQUES FOR TODAY? COUNTERINSURGENCY: The John Paul Vann Model By Rich Webster In November of 1968, I can remember the legendary John Paul Vann speaking to our graduation class of newly trained advisors at Di An, South Vietnam. You can't win a guerrilla war by dropping bombs from the air, he said.

You may kill some of the enemy, but you will alienate the people you are there trying to help, and they will turn against you. John Paul Vann was our 'Lawrence of Arabia' in Vietnam. He spent 10 years there, first as an American infantry officer, then later as the main architect of the Vietnamization/Pacification program. Other words of his I remember were, 'You need to go after the guerrilla with a rifle at the village level and kill them face-to-face. And to do that effectively, you need local Soldiers from the area to assist you.

If the locals are properly led and equipped, they will do the job.' What Vann was saying seems to me to be applicable to Iraq today. You need the support of the local population and indigenous troops to combat the guerrillas/terrorists/thugs on their own turf. Large conventional American military infantry units aren't necessarily best suited for this task.

Most think that it was just the Special Forces who were conducting counterinsurgency (COIN) operations in Vietnam. Very few have heard about the Co Van Mis (Vietnamese for American Advisors) and the mobile advisory teams (MATs). After 1968, fewer than 5000 assisted, advised, and to use a recently coined term, were 'embedded' with a 500,000 Regional Force/Popular Force Army that took the war to the enemy at the local level for a period of over five years. There were 354 mobile advisory teams made up of five U.S. Army personnel (two officers and three NCOs). The MATs were really a scaled-down Special Forces team with one of the NCOs being a medic and there was a Vietnamese interpreter for communication purposes. As a young lieutenant, I served with a number of Popular Force platoons and Regional Force companies while a member of Advisor Terms 49 and 86.

Very little has been written about this little known aspect of the Vietnam War. In the book about John Paul Vann and the advisory effort, A Bright and Shining Lie, the big lie is what the author, Neil Sheehan, leaves out of the book.

Most of the book deals with the South Vietnamese Army and the advisory effort up to the Tet Offensive in 1968, and very little if any detail or mention is given to the many years afterward where the Regional Forces and Popular Forces gave quite a good accounting of themselves against the enemy. Sheehan spends the first 700 pages of his book detailing how bad the South Vietnamese Army was up to the end of 1967 (parts of which are true), then spends several pages on the Tet Offensive in early 1968, in which he fails to emphasize that the main fighting units of the Viet Cong army including their commanders and NCOs were eliminated, never again to become a viable fighting force. Some interpret this sound defeat of the Viet Cong as a deliberate attempt by the Hanoi Leaders to eliminate their comrades in the south. Sheehan then skips five years of the war effort where the Regional Forces/Popular Forces held their own against the NVA/VC and defeated them in most of the smaller unnamed battles of the war at the village level. Then he picks up again with the 1972 Easter Offensive where Vann was killed, not by enemy contact, but by a during the monsoon rains.

Barely 30 pages of Sheehan's book are devoted to Vann's success with Vietnamization. There was hardly mention of the Regional Forces/Popular Forces [RF/PF] the home militias, the little guys in tennis shoes, who inflicted over one-third of the casualties against the enemy. I spent almost nine months with these little guys as a lieutenant taking the fight to the VC at the hamlet and village level. Not all the RF/PFs were great Soldiers, but many of them were if properly led, just as Vann had told us at the advisor school. Nicknamed the 'Ruff-Puffs', they were not configured to stand up against a large force of NVA regulars, but they could provide security for the locals in a hamlet or village. The Soldiers either had their families living with them, or in the nearby village.

Who better to know when the enemy was coming into a village than those who lived there? There were many times when I knew when the Vietcong were coming into the village at night to recruit or create havoc.

And then instead of being ambushed, I and my little band of Popular Force Soldiers became the ambusher. We beat the guerrillas at their own game. We took the night away from them. We no longer patrolled endlessly and aimlessly looking for a needle in a haystack, waiting for the enemy to initiate contact.

We waited for them in the darkness of the night, and kicked hell out of them. In today's military vernacular, we preempted them. That's how you fight the guerrilla and the terrorist and beat him at his own game. I cringe now watching news clips on TV as young American Soldiers in Iraq are ambushed by snipers and blown up with the new version of the command-controlled booby trap, the IED (improvised explosive device). But how would the young American Soldiers be able to distinguish the al-Qaida terrorist from a local Iraqi civilization? The simple answer is, they can't.

And how do they find the IED? The answer is they can't unless an informer warns beforehand as to the location. I believe the answer to this problem is found in the type of force that Vann created in Vietnam, coordinated by CORDS (Civil Operations for Revolutionary Development Support).

So different was this approach to conventional warfare tactics that Vann insisted it be operated under civilian control on equal footing with the military hierarchy. Vann really wanted the U.S. Military advisors to be in command of the Ruff-Puffs instead of being advisors, but Robert Komer, the first director of CORDS, resisted this idea. Vanns approach to counterinsurgency was the blending of all civilian agencies in Vietnam under CORDS with a loan of 1800 U.S. Military personnel to serve as advisors to local Soldiers to provide security for all aspects of the U.S. Effort in Vietnam. These were the front line guys who made up the mobile advisory teams, who moved from one RF/PF unit to another accompanying them on day and night time operations.

It seems to me we are always waiting for the enemy to ambush us in Iraq. The first strike is always thrown by the terrorist, and then we react by sometimes killing Iraqi civilians as the sniper fades away into the crowd.

This unfortunate response is, in itself, a tactic of the terrorist/insurgent/enemy combatant. Don't we need to pre-empt the terrorist as he is preparing the IED to blow up an unsuspecting U.S. Soldier and don't we need to know that a terrorist cell from outside Iraq has begun operating in a neighborhood?

To do so, we need intelligence from the local civilians and Soldiers from the area who understand the language, customs, and dynamics of the local situation, who can easily point out strangers in the area even though they speak the same language, but look different. The best of the MAT teams helped perform all of the above missions because they lived with their Vietnamese counterparts 24 hours a day, ate their food, got to know their families and developed friendships that last even today, 28 years after the war. The Co Vans did not retreat back to a secure base camp far removed from the people they were trying to help and defend.

So where do we get the local Soldiers in Iraq to perform this mission? As a former Co Van, I sat in astonishment when I saw the 500,000 man Iraqi Army being disbanded and sent home immediately after Saddam's main army collapsed. For the most part, they surrendered without firing a shot. Why send home a trained army, although obviously not well trained according to Western standards, but surely part of them could have been used along the guidelines of the MAT team concept in Vietnam? I realize that all of Saddam's army could not have been used like we used the RF/PF in Vietnam, but surely some of them could.

It was obvious that a large number of Saddam's conscripted forces were not loyal to him. We could have had local Iraqi Soldiers patrolling under the command of small military advisor teams to help flush out enemy combatants and newly arrived in-country al-Qaida terrorists.

The advisor teams would provide the coordination and communication with the larger American units in the area. This would enhance security for the civilian efforts and NGOs in Iraq. The Iraqi civilians must feel safe and secure before a new form of government can develop without the imprint of a terrorist stamp.

I believe that what Vann said in the 1960s in Vietnam is relevant today in Iraq as it relates to counterinsurgency. All the high-tech gadgetry and firepower that our military has today, leaves us relatively helpless when it comes to fighting the. An innocent civilian killed translates into a win for the terrorist.

To avoid this, it takes the Soldier-on-the-ground with a rifle taking the fight to the terrorist, in an area that he previously thought was a safe sanctuary. And to do that, you need local Soldiers familiar with the terrain, the language and the customs of the area. John Paul Vann understood that. The Vietnam Was has been mis-remembered, mis-understood, and mis-reported in regard to John Paul Vann's effort with Vietnamization and the fighting ability of the South Vietnamese Soldier. Sheehan has done them a great disservice in his book, A Bright And Shining Lie, from which a movie of like title was made.

Few know that the Viet Cong lost the war, and that they were no longer a viable force after 1968. The Viet Cong could not have won the war and bested the South Vietnamese Army in battle. The advisory effort in Vietnam wasn't perfect, but the South Vietnamese forces held their own in the 1972 Easter Offensive by the North.

The South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) was finally defeated in 1975 when they were invaded by the fifth largest army in the world. They were invaded by 17 divisions of the North Vietnamese Army to include over 700 tanks that steamrolled everyone in front of them.

The North Vietnamese were still being supplied with war materiel by their allies, the Soviets and Chinese, while the allies of the South Vietnamese, the United States, abandoned them in their hour of need. The, and the NVA could concentrate superior forces at weak points in the South. The myth perpetuated by the anti-war media was that the South Vietnamese military was no good. I returned to the province capital of Xuan Loc, Vietnam, in 2002 and visited the large communist cemetery there filled with 5000 graves. This is where the last battle of the Vietnam War was fought, where the 18th ARVN Division defeated three NVA divisions before finally being overrun by 40,000 of the enemy. Would Vann's model of counterinsurgency work in Iraq today?

That's a good question, but what is the alternative? Our Soldiers now are getting tired, and our forces are being stretched too thin to continue the mission indefinitely. The architect of the 1975 invasion of South Vietnam, North Vietnamese Tein Van Dung, in an indirect manner, gave Vann a complement for his conduct of the pacification program. In his book, Great Spring Victory, he never once mentions revolutionary warfare or the guerrilla tactics of the Viet Cong as aiding him in his final assault on the South. That's because Vann's program of Vietnamization had basically wrested control of the south from the guerrillas who we no longer a viable fighting force. That's rather ironic, isn't it?

The myth exists today that peasants wearing rubber tire sandals employing guerrilla tactics won the war in Vietnam. Our officials in Iraq are saying it will take three to five years to build an Iraqi Army. With Vann's model, we could have taken the best of the 500,000 former Iraqi military, and put them under the control of U.S. Military advisors. Instead of having young American Soldiers patrolling the streets of Baghdad and the smaller cities around the country, surely we could have used Iraqi Soldiers advised by several thousand American military personnel.

Instead, we sent them home to do what? Unlike Vietnam, there is no outside Army that is going to invade Iraq in division-size strength and overwhelm our military units there. Our powerful and well-trained military units, with the aid of the British, have already won the big battles of the war.

Now we need small units of local Soldiers taking the war to the enemy at the village level. I see no other way to preempt the terrorist before he has the time to act. The small suitcase bomb, the suicide bomber, chemical and germ warfare, and the IED, all weapons used by the terrorists in the 21st century, make it necessary to defend everywhere.

The terrorist will always go for the target of opportunity, searching for the most vulnerable target. And this appears to be the difficulty of the are of the future the preempting of the terrorist before he can strike.

Or, even before that, having the will and knowledge of how to preempt the terrorist. Note: The above article appeared in Counterparts quarterly journal Sitrep in the Winter/Spring 2004 issue. Counterpart is an association of U.S.-Vietnamese advisors and their Vietnamese counterparts. For more information on the author, the association and its periodical, contact: Ken Jacobsen; kjacobsen@knology.net UPDATE 2008: TIME TO LEARN FROM VIETNAM AND JOHN PAUL VANN PROBLEM #1. Military lusting for nation-state wars (NSWs) wrong for COIN/SASO operations: Consequences of American Narcissism in Iraq Garrison Mentality in Iraq/Afghanistan: the 'Presence Patrol' = Delegating COIN/SASO Dirty Work like it were lawn care VIDEO PROOF: WHAT WRONG LOOKS LIKE: Trucks on Roads = Land Mines = Deaths www.youtube.com/watch?v=txfHswsVJqg 1.

Stop ' Presence patrolling': there is no PEACE to ' keep'--so stop driving around aimlessly like a beat cop when being seen ENRAGES the populace as a foreign occupier; this isn't New York City where being seen deters crimes--it INVITES violence 2. STAY OFF ROADS: stop being so damn lazy. Park ALL wheeled trucks since they cannot leave roads where land mines wait. WHY GIVE THE REBELS EASY TARGETS TO BLOW UP? If you have to go somewhere to set-up a checkpoint, guard an area, lay an ambush (security creating maneuvers) go in TRACKS and go by unpredictable, cross-country routes. Don't Clusterfuck: no troops on foot in WW2 style formations in bad camouflage bunched together 4. No Half-Assed Vehicle checkpoints: use BLAST WALLS to channelize incoming cars and compartmentalize any car bombs going off.

Use a robot and/or bomb dog to inspect car for guns or explosives. No more than 1 man near the car and only if you have to; use loud speakers from a tracked armored vehicle and/or a guard tower covering the inspection proicess with rifle and machine gun fire and have person get out of car if IDed as a rebel and walk through a blast wall lane and have him swiped for guns/explosives--if he's wearing a bomb he only takes out some easily replaced blast walls 5. Stop accepting any war situations given; the responsibility of the general officer is to insist that the goals and means are moral and feasible This video shows in alarming detail the incompetent ' From Here to Eternity' U.S.

Army and USMC suffering as victims due to its failure to know WHAT RIGHT LOOKS LIKE for a sub-national conflict. Www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnVZRgiOw-o The non-linear battlefield (NLB) is dominated by high explosives (HE); not feel-good, kinetic energy (KE) bullet gunslinger duels. Combat Engineering is the key. War is not a macho ego trip; its about whose WILL dominates the situation. A competent, professional Army SMOTHERS sub-national conflict violence and does not add to it. This can give time for a political settlement to be had, but we can ill afford to drag our feet on it.and if Iraq is just a corporation feeding frenzy backed by an illegitimate puppet government, then military men damn well better open their mouths to Congress and get a legitimate mission to accomplish by demanding real elections be held immediately--monitored by outside agencies to insure we just don't lie again and put another puppet in charge like Mr.

BOTTOM LINE: Let's stop looking like and acting like a gadgetized version of the Red Coats. Canadians in Afghanistan Fail in LAV3Stryker Trucks Afghan: Other War LAV3 Strykers Ruin Effort 1 www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm2cuwJati8 PBS Documentary Afghanistan: The Other War, reveals that the emasculation of western armies into wheeled trucks like the LAV-III/Stryker to not LOOK war-like (ie; look less capable, which they are) cannot even overcome the battle against earth terrain to have basic mobility to reach people in closed terrains in jeopardy at the hands of sub-national groups rebelling against the nation-state. You look less capable means you ARE less capable and being weak with a ' glass jaw' neither protects the good civilians nor engenders respect from the enemy. ' Nation-building' in war zones in wheeled trucks is a disaster.

Also telling is the Canadian Multi-National Force Commander's obsession with self; who cares how history will judge him? The Mission and the Men should come before ' Me'. By being in road-bound wheeled trucks, the NATO MN forces have a ' glass jaw' that makes it impossible to 'turn- the-other-cheek' so they are trigger-happy trying to use firepower to compensate for a lack of M113 Gavin-type tracked cross-country mobility (avoid road troubles in first place) and armored protection. When NATO forces are caught red-handed needlessly killing Afghan civilians, as a Cover-Your-Ass (CYA) politician--maybe without a technotactical grasp of what his subordinates are doing--he gives the standard c'est la guerre (it is war, blame it not our incompetence or willful wrong-doing) excuses sure to infuriate the people whom we want to stay out of the Taliban's camp.

He offers that the Soldiers might be court-martialed but he doesn't show any grasp that he has them in bad situations setting them up for such failures; for example they live in exposed tents when they should be in dug-in and Hesco-covered ISO shipping container 'BATTLEBOXes' at their forward operating bases (FOBs). WRONG RIGHT www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qdHqBKbaAI Hopefully, he and others will watch this PBS video and realize they need to hand out bright-orange traffic cones or saw horses so his troops can start actually visibly marking impromptu road blocks (place a sign on one of the cones/saw horses saying ' STOP!'

In the local language) at THE PROPER DISTANCE TO GIVE CAR BOMB STAND-OFF PROTECTION and stop the gleeful ' warning shot' BS which lets cars/trucks get too close in the first place and results in needless dead/wounded innocent civilians. WRONG www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAJ46Wosrn0 RIGHT www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJpYvbu4KhU Do we want an excuse to open fire and kill ' ragheads' confirming we are just there to take their oil/natural resources or do we want to do what's morally RIGHT and technotactically BEST to protect our troops and avoid misunderstandings that kill innocent civilians and feed the rebellion? For all the $$$ millions going into sexy helicopters to fly him around, surely he can afford some traffic cones/saw horses? Or some spark plugs? (see part 2). Watching the PBS video clipabove may not make these lessons obvious; maybe he and other decision-makers will read our captions here and follow the lead of the British and Dutch and re-equip ALL NATO forces with M113 Gavin or other type light tracks since Afghanistan's terrain is traversable by these low ground-pressure vehicles and not wheeled trucks with any armor protection. The Canadians to their credit, have since this video factored in their constant LAV3 Stryker truck failures in Afghanistan and turned more and more to tracked vehicles.

Its clear that to do SASO/COIN operations properly, we need a dedicated non-linear, battlefield stability corps composed of older, more mature, psychologically-screened to not be narcissist ' shooters' properly equipped with light M113 Gavin armored tracks, to scour the skies 24/7/365 and not constantly crash like UAVs do and see hiding enemies with human eyesight plus sensory help---and plenty of combat engineers to repair the country's infrastructure and separation wall apart warring factions and security fence trouble-makers out. Afghan: Other War LAV3 Strykers Ruin Effort 2 www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsO54MQi6es PBS documentary shows a Canadian Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) at an isolated FOB in Afghanistan trying to win over a nearby village from Taliban rebel sympathy by repairing their water pumps and supplying other needed items.

The kingdom is lost for want of a nail when the native contracted supply column is turned away because the bomb sniffing dog discovers a driver has traces of explosives. Why OPSEC is violated by having locals drive supplies to FOBs in the first place? Thus, they cannot get measly spark plugs and LAV-III/ Stryker clusterfuck drive into a run-down road-side black market where their ' shooter' foot narcissists hop out and proceed to ' block' the road by NOT blocking it as if Afghans who have lived with guns for centuries are going to cower at them brandishing firearms. 'Look-At-Me-I-Have-A-Gun-Treat-Me-Like-god' Complex When Afghans continue to drive because the Canadians didn't even post traffic cones or forward vehicles to stop traffic for convoys to pass, they eagerly open fire with ' warning shots'. Even when moving they don't feel safe in their allegedly 'armored' LAV3 Strykers spitting out warning shots left and right and causing a truck to over-turn and nearly killing an innocent Afghan. How many spark plugs would the UH-60 MEDEVAC helicopter flight have paid for if it had been prevented? How many brand-new water pumps?

A ' pound-of-cure' MEDEVAC helicopter is flown in to fly him out, but the ' ounce preventable' damage is already done. So much for ' winning hearts and minds' this day. Emasculated ground troops in wheeled LAV-III/ Stryker trucks are set up for road/trail restricted failure wherever they are. Afghan: Other War LAV3Strykers Ruin Effort 3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZandbBaUw_U Video begins with the PRT female officer explaining the need to win over the villagers to a smartass kill/capture enlisted narcissist obsessed with the ' Taliban all around'. By conveniently being in wheeled LAV3/ Strykers without cross-country mobility he is exempt from having to patrol or set up LP/OPs to scour the immediate area of his own FOB of Taliban asking for a M16 vs AK47 firefight. What he can do when not sharpshooting his officers is play kill/capture on a laptop as his buddy nearby is doing.

Me thinks he could better spend his time making some 'STOP!' Signs in the local Afghan language to bolster impromptu road blocks and prevent the need to 'bust caps' into civilians. At 2: 58 yet another LAV3/ Stryker clusterfuck convoy is sent down the road hit by a little rain to make contact with another village to win them over when they can't even keep their promises to their first village adjacent to their FOB. A LAV3 Stryker gets stuck in a little mud ON THE ROAD and breaks its main bearing. While their officer spins a tail almost as fast as the rubber tires are in the deepening mud, the mission is ABORTED. The ' recovery' LAV3Stryker yanks out the first truck but its hitched up to a regular LAV3 Stryker to tow back to base.

Then as the pair start to move--THEY BOTH GET STUCK in a minor mud rut that would be nothing for a light M113 Gavin armored track to drive through without even stopping to blink. With darkness falling, they need to get back to base before the Taliban come out; the NCOIC walks away in disgust he's been given crap wheeled vehicles to work with. STILL PHOTOS OF THE LAV-III DEBACLE IN AFGHANISTAN (AMERICANS EXPERIENCE THIS DAILY, TOO) 1: UHO. Its raining in Afghanistan.

20-ton wheeled trucks + muddy roads don't mix. Too bad wars don't take place where its comfortable and dry.

2: ' We are going to make contact with a new village and reach out to them and win over their hearts and minds in our low-maintenance, all-terrain, high-speed SASO wheeled vehicles. Our LAV-IIIs are used by the Americans who call them 'Strykers'. I'm going 60 miles per hour on the road!!'

(Not for long!) LAV-III stuck a 1st time; Road Speed: 0 MPH 4: ' Ohhh.sh$%^&! I drove into a rut.'

5: ' Can we get it out?' 6: ' We had technical difficulties and had to cancel the mission to the village' 7: ' What's that dangling underneath the LAV-III?' Its the main bearing. Its broke, man. This thing won't run its trashed.' 9: ' What a Piece-of-Shit (POS).'

10: ' Careful! Don't get the 'recovery' LAV-III stuck, too!' 11: ' Oh Boy. The 'recovery' LAV-III is spinning in the mud, too.'

12: ' Please.please grip.grip.we don't want to be stuck here outside the wire when the sun goes down.' LAV-III stuck a 2d time: and it gets another truck stuck, too! 13: ' Gun it!!! Get through the dip!' We are Stuck Again!

BOTH LAV3 STRYKERS!!! It's Getting Dark!'

15: ' We Got to get Back to the FOB before the Taliban come out!' 16: ' Go Easy! Let the Wheels Catch!'

Cut the Engine!' 18: ' Mission Aborted!

Maybe an officer will figure this out.' ' We REALLY showed our Afghan allies today why they should trust their very lives to us. We need to turn these pieces-of-shit in and get tracks so we can win' Fortunately, they survive the debacle and ask the nearby villagers to WALK TO THEM at the FOB to receive the supplies that finally arrive, compromising their own security as well as revealing the villagers to any watchful Taliban as being NATO sympathizers. If this isn't bad enough, the smirking 'shooters' tell them the doctor has run out of supplies and they must walk back to their village, essentially empty handed. If these Canadians had M113 Gavins instead of LAV3Stryker wheels they could have DROVE the doctor cross-country to the village and done medical assistance and passed out whatever supplies they had---discreetly in a designated home. Clearly, smirking nation-state war narcissists receiving full-time pay/benefits (welfare recipients in sexy uniforms) wrongly look down on these ' ragheads' as ' slackers' looking for a ' free hand-out' when really they are Islamofascism victims who with a little help might be our friends-for-life if we respect their dignity and follow-through with our promises. To CYA, the FOB is suddenly dismantled and removed from the area; violating the proven ink blot strategy of counter-insurgency which is to stay and expand goodwill--which is what the Dutch are succeeding at doing in Afghanistan using light mechanized M113 Gavins.

LAV-3/ Strykerrrrs fail in Afghanistan and the Canadians ditch their own wheeled trucks they make for more mobile and better armored tracks! Enter the Leopards and M113 MTVL Gavins!

The Dutch are using M113 Gavin tracks, too and are being VERY successful in counter-insurgency operations! What caused the turn-around? A DESIRE TO WIN, NOT CONTINUE TO LOSE IN WHEELED TRUCKS. We need to stop wasting billions on fatally flawed, break-down-prone wheeled Stryker trucks that fail to get the job done and put our men into constant road/trail ambushes and put our money into M113 Gavin light for cross-country mobility but medium-weight in armor protection tracks that don't get stuck and break down in a mere light rain and minor mud. Tom Ricks' article in the Washington Post reveals yet more reasons why we need a dedicated Non-Linear Battlefield or Sub-National Conflict Stability Corps (NLB-SC OR SNC-C) that would listen to all its Soldiers regardless of rank and not treat rebellions like it was just lawn care dirty work that lower ranks need to go out and prune. If what you are growing is 'poison ivy' trimming it isn't the solution.the solution is to STOP GROWING WEEDS (making rebel humans).

If we don't form a NLB-SC OR SNC-C we will have learned nothing from Iraq like we failed after Vietnam.and we will repeat all these mistakes again with more thousands of our young people paying for it with their lives and limbs! We need a NLB-SC OR SNC-C that is ready BEFORE the war to rapidly bring back TV, radio and telephone service and call out to former Army Soldiers and government employees to return to work the next day, and have THE MONEY TO PAY THEM to restore social order. We need to stop being so stingy. This also applies to Afghanistan (see article below Ricks' article). Garrison Army and marine generals who have everything provided to them, chow halls, direct deposit every 2 weeks etc. Have no clue whatsoever of how civilian life is a struggle to make ends meet and that SOMEONE has to grow and prepare the food they take for granted as they walk intro a.

They all live in a phony, cloistered mini-society of 'From Here to Eternity' each day subsidized by U.S. Tax payers to allegedly be 'attack dogs' let out once every 10 years to do nation-state war, then returned to their garrison 'cages'. What we need to prevail in COIN/SASO is a helpful ' Lassie' that can when threatened fend off attacks not kill/capture ' Attack of the Dobermans' 24/7/365. Living in Former dictator Palaces Enrages the Populace: DON'T DO IT! Www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmAhL8iPutA The ' presence patrol' mentality now ensconced in the new COIN manual FM 3-24 (LTG Petraeus is co-author with marine general Mattis) despite being a miserable failure in Iraq for over 4 years and Afghanistan for 5 years, is on FOBs as they delegate the dirty work of appeasing the masses to lower-ranking Soldiers who try to ' cut deals' with them when the situation itself is already damned by the higher ranks' parameters.

Its just the garrison mentality back in the states of the generals and colonels and majors ordering lower ranking personnel to mow lawns and polish floors, except this time its having Soldiers expose themselves to constant enemy ambush to placate the locals or to kill/capture the rebels to ' tidy-the-area'. Its not lower ranking 'empowerment' its snobby delegating the 'dirty work' to lower-ranking Soldiers to do EVERYTHING and somehow try to overcome SYSTEMIC problems CREATED BY THE SENIOR OFFICERS. For example, maybe the best CONOPS is to rehire the old Army and create town/village RF/PF security forces to keep rebels out, not have U.S.

Forces enter/leave villages/towns with ' presence patrols' which exposes our men to road ambushes and yields control right back to the rebels? Real empowerment would not be a top-down, one-way RHIP tidy-my-area drill, it would be the lower-ranking Soldiers sitting at the table of the ' councils of war' (Bible, God: ' with wise counsel make war') and CHANGING THE SYSTEMIC PARAMETERS of the operation with their input so we have a WINNING CONOPS. 'Presence patrolling' is senior officers trying to have junior Soldiers do their jobs without their power, funds and authority to change the conditions so they can at least have a chance to succeed. Iraq: Kill/Capture/Torture: have U.S.

Troops tidy the area www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/22/AR004.html In Iraq, Military Forgot Lessons of Vietnam Early Missteps by U.S. Left Troops Unprepared for Guerrilla Warfare By Thomas E.

Ricks Washington Post Staff Writer The real war in Iraq -- the one to determine the future of the country -- began on Aug. 7, 2003, when a car bomb exploded outside the Jordanian Embassy, killing 11 and wounding more than 50. That bombing came almost exactly four months after the U.S.

Military thought it had prevailed in Iraq, and it launched the insurgency, the bloody and protracted struggle with guerrilla fighters that has tied the United States down to this day. There is some evidence that Saddam Hussein's government knew it couldn't win a conventional war, and some captured documents indicate that it may have intended some sort of rear-guard campaign of subversion against occupation. The stockpiling of weapons, distribution of arms caches, the revolutionary roots of the Baathist Party, and the movement of money and people to Syria either before or during the war all indicate some planning for an insurgency. But there is also strong evidence, based on a review of thousands of military documents and hundreds of interviews with military personnel, that the U.S. Approach to pacifying Iraq in the months after the collapse of Hussein helped spur the insurgency and made it bigger and stronger than it might have been. The very setup of the U.S. Presence in Iraq undercut the mission.

The chain of command was hazy, with no one individual in charge of the overall American effort in Iraq, a structure that led to frequent clashes between military and civilian officials. On May 16, 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-run occupation agency, had issued his first order, ' De-Baathification of Iraq Society.' The CIA station chief in Baghdad had argued vehemently against the radical move, contending: ' By nightfall, you'll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists underground.

And in six months, you'll really regret this.' He was proved correct, as Bremer's order, along with a second that dissolved the Iraqi military and national police, created a new class of disenfranchised, threatened leaders. Exacerbating the effect of this decision were the U.S. Army's interactions with the civilian population. Based on its experience in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Army thought it could prevail through ' presence' -- that is, Soldiers demonstrating to Iraqis that they are in the area, mainly by patrolling. ' We've got that habit that carries over from the Balkans,' one Army general said. Back then, patrols were conducted so frequently that some officers called the mission there ' DAB'-ing, for ' driving around Bosnia.'

Military jargon for this was ' boots-on-the-ground,' or, more officially, the presence mission. There was no formal doctrinal basis for this in the Army manuals and training that prepare the military for its operations, but the notion crept into the vocabularies of senior officers. For example, a briefing by the 1 st Armored Division's engineering brigade stated that one of its major missions would be ' presence patrols.' And then-Maj.

Sanchez, then the commander of that division, ordered one of his brigade commanders to 'flood your zone, get out there, and figure it out.' Sitting in a outside a palace in the Green Zone in May 2003, he added: ' Your business is to ensure that the presence of the American Soldier is felt, and it's not just Americans zipping by.'

[EDITOR: he wouldn't be in that tent for long with a posh palace nearby] The flaw in this approach, Lt. Christopher Holshek, a civil affairs officer, later noted, was that after Iraqi public opinion began to turn against the Americans and see them as occupiers, 'then the presence of troops... Becomes counterproductive.' Mission in Iraq is made up overwhelmingly of regular combat units, rather than smaller, lower-profile Special Forces units.

And in 2003, most conventional commanders did what they knew how to do: send out large numbers of troops and vehicles on conventional combat missions. Soldiers seemed to understand the centrality of Iraqi pride and the humiliation Iraqi men felt in being overseen by this Western army. Foot patrols in Baghdad were greeted during this time with solemn waves from old men and cheers from children, but with baleful stares from many young Iraqi men. Complicating the U.S. Effort was the difficulty top officials had in recognizing what was going on in Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald H.

Rumsfeld at first was dismissive of the looting that followed the U.S. Arrival and then for months refused to recognize that an insurgency was breaking out there. A reporter pressed him one day that summer: Aren't you facing a guerrilla war? 'I guess the reason I don't use the phrase 'guerrilla war' is because there isn't one,' Rumsfeld responded.

A few weeks later, Army Gen. Abizaid succeeded Gen. Franks as the top U.S. Military commander in the Middle East. He used his first news conference as commander to clear up the strategic confusion about what was happening in Iraq. Opponents of the U.S.

Presence were conducting 'a classical guerrilla-style campaign,' he said. 'It's a war, however you describe it.' That fall, U.S. Tactics became more aggressive. [EDITOR: kill/capture] This was natural, even reasonable, coming in response to the increased attacks on U.S. Forces and a series of suicide bombings. But it also appears to have undercut the U.S.

Government's long-term strategy. 'When you're facing a counterinsurgency war, if you get the strategy right, you can get the tactics wrong, and eventually you'll get the tactics right,' said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a veteran of Special Forces in the Vietnam War. ' If you get the strategy wrong and the tactics right at the start, you can refine the tactics forever, but you still lose the war.

That's basically what we did in Vietnam.' For the first 20 months or more of the American occupation in Iraq, it was what the U.S. Military would do there as well.

'What you are seeing here is an unconventional war fought conventionally,' a Special Forces lieutenant colonel remarked gloomily one day in Baghdad as the violence intensified. The tactics that the regular troops used, he added, sometimes subverted American goals.

Draconian Interrogation Ideas On the morning of Aug. 14, 2003, Capt. William Ponce, an officer in the ' Human Intelligence Effects Coordination Cell' at the top U.S. Military headquarters in Iraq, sent a memo to subordinate commands asking what interrogation techniques they would like to use.

'The gloves are coming off regarding these detainees,' he told them. His e-mail, and the responses it provoked from members of the Army intelligence community across Iraq, are illustrative of the mind-set of the U.S. Military during this period. 'Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow Soldiers from any further attacks,' Ponce wrote. He told them, 'Provide interrogation techniques 'wish list' by 17 AUG 03.' [EDITOR: instead of stopping the BS presence patrolling in Humvee trucks/on foot with tracked Security Creating Maneuvers, let's kill/capture/torture and try to attrit the bad guys with RMA air strike rather than change ourselves to do maneuver better] Some of the responses to his solicitation were enthusiastic. With clinical precision, a Soldier attached to the 3 rd Armored Cavalry Regiment recommended by e-mail 14 hours later that interrogators use ' open-handed facial slaps from a distance of no more than about two feet and back-handed blows to the midsection from a distance of about 18 inches.'

He also reported that ' fear of dogs and snakes appear to work nicely.' The 4 th Infantry Division's intelligence operation responded three days later with suggestions that captives be hit with closed fists and also subjected to ' low-voltage electrocution.' But not everyone was as sanguine as those two units. ' We need to take a deep breath and,' cautioned a major with the 501 st Military Intelligence Battalion, which supported the operations of the 1 st Armored Division in Iraq.

' It comes down to standards of right and wrong -- something we cannot just put aside when we find it inconvenient, any more than we can declare that we will 'take no prisoners' and therefore shoot those who surrender to us simply because we find prisoners inconvenient.' Feeding the interrogation system was a major push by U.S. Commanders to round up Iraqis. The key to ' actionable intelligence' was seen by many as conducting huge sweeps to detain and question Iraqis. Sometimes units acted on tips, but sometimes they just detained all able-bodied males of combat age in areas known to be anti-American.

[EDITOR: creating rebels for sure] These steps were seen inside the Army as a major success story, and they were portrayed as such to journalists. The problem was that the U.S. Military, having assumed it would be operating in a relatively benign environment, wasn't set up for a massive effort that called on it to apprehend, detain and interrogate Iraqis, to analyze the information gleaned, and then to act on it. 'As commanders at all levels sought operational intelligence, it became apparent that the intelligence structure was undermanned, under-equipped and inappropriately organized for counter-insurgency operations,' Lt. Jones wrote in an official Army report a year later.

Intelligence officers in Iraq later estimated that about 85 percent of the tens of thousands rounded up were of no intelligence value. [EDITOR: they are now rebels for sure] But as they were delivered to the Abu Ghraib prison, they overwhelmed the system and often waited for weeks to be interrogated, during which time they could be recruited by hard-core insurgents, who weren't isolated from the general prison population. In improvising a response to the insurgency, the U.S.

Forces worked hard and had some successes. Yet they frequently were led poorly by commanders unprepared for their mission. The advice of those who had studied the American experience there was ignored.

[EDITOR: who has time to sudy COIN/SASO? We got lawns to mow, change-of-command ceremonies to attend etc.] That summer, retired marine Col. Gary Anderson, an ' expert' in small wars, was sent to Baghdad by the Pentagon to advise on how to better put down the emerging insurgency.

He met with Bremer in early July. Ambassador, here are some programs that worked in Vietnam,' Anderson said. It was the wrong word to put in front of Bremer. Bremer exploded, according to Anderson.

I don't want to talk about Vietnam. This is not Vietnam. This is Iraq!' [EDITOR: Bremer should have been fired immediately after issuing his De-Baath and fire Iraqi Army orders, and these ordered counter-manded] This was one of the early indications that U.S. Officials would obstinately refuse to learn from the past as they sought to run Iraq.

One of the essential texts on counterinsurgency was written in 1964 by David Galula, a lieutenant colonel in the French army who was born in Tunisia, witnessed guerrilla warfare on three continents and died in 1967. When the United States went into Iraq, his book, ' Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice,' was almost unknown within the military, which is one reason it is possible to open Galula's text almost at random and find principles of counterinsurgency that the American effort failed to heed. Galula warned specifically against the kind of large-scale conventional operations the United States repeatedly launched with brigades and battalions, even if they held out the allure of short-term gains in intelligence. He insisted that firepower must be viewed very differently than in regular war. 'A Soldier fired upon in conventional war who does not fire back with every available weapon would be guilty of a dereliction of his duty,' he wrote, adding that 'the reverse would be the case in counterinsurgency warfare, where the rule is to apply the minimum of fire.' Military took a different approach in Iraq. It wasn't indiscriminate in its use of firepower, but it tended to look upon it as good, especially during the big counteroffensive in the fall of 2003, and in the two battles in Fallujah the following year.

One reason for that different approach was the muddled strategy of U.S. Commanders in Iraq. As civil affairs officers found to their dismay, Army leaders tended to see the Iraqi people as the playing field on which a contest was played against insurgents. In Galula's view, the people are the prize. [EDITOR: why we need a NLB-SC OR SNC-C to be Civil Affairs Command's body guards/muscle so the dumb-ass nation-state war kill/capture/torture types don't run the show into the ground] 'The population... Becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy,' he wrote. [EDITOR: Oh really?

According to FM 3-24, MILITARY CONTROL is the number #1 priority, the support of the populace is secondary]. From that observation flows an entirely different way of dealing with civilians in the midst of a guerrilla war. 'Since antagonizing the population will not help, it is imperative that hardships for it and rash actions on the part of the forces be kept to a minimum,' Galula wrote. Cumulatively, the American ignorance of long-held precepts of counterinsurgency warfare impeded the U.S.

Military during 2003 and part of 2004. Combined with a personnel policy that pulled out all the seasoned forces early in 2004 and replaced them with green troops, it isn't surprising that the U.S. Effort often resembled that of Sisyphus, the king in Greek legend who was condemned to perpetually roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down as he neared the top.

Again and again, in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, U.S. Forces launched major new operations to assert and reassert control in Fallujah, in Ramadi, in Samarra, in Mosul. 'Scholars are virtually unanimous in their judgment that conventional forces often lose unconventional wars because they lack a conceptual understanding of the war they are fighting,' Lt. Matthew Moten, chief of military history at West Point, would comment in 2004. Gregory Peterson studied a few months later at Fort Leavenworth's School of Advanced Military Studies, an elite course that trains military planners and strategists, he found the U.S.

Experience in Iraq in 2003-2004 remarkably similar to the in the 1950s. Both involved Western powers exercising sovereignty in Arab states, both powers were opposed by insurgencies contesting that sovereignty, and both wars were controversial back home. Most significant for Peterson's analysis, he found both the French and U.S. Militaries woefully unprepared for the task at hand. ' Currently, the U.S. Military does not have a viable counterinsurgency doctrine, understood by all Soldiers, or taught at service schools,' he concluded.

Casey Implements a New Tactic In mid-2004, Gen. Took over from Sanchez as the top U.S. Commander in Iraq.

One of Casey's advisers, Kalev Sepp, pointedly noted in a study that fall that the U.S. Effort in Iraq was violating many of the major principles of counterinsurgency, such as putting an emphasis on killing insurgents instead of engaging the population. A year later, frustrated by the inability of the Army to change its approach to training for Iraq, Casey established his own academy in Taji, Iraq, to teach counterinsurgency to U.S. Officers as they arrived in the country. He made attending its course there a prerequisite to commanding a unit in Iraq. ' We are finally getting around to doing the right things,' Army Reserve Lt.

Joe Rice observed one day in Iraq early in 2006. ' But is it too little, too late?'

One of the few commanders who were successful in Iraq in that first year of the occupation, Lt. David Petraeus, made studying counterinsurgency a requirement at the Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, where mid-career officers are trained. By the academic year that ended last month, 31 of 78 student monographs at the School of Advanced Military Studies next door were devoted to counterinsurgency or stability operations, compared with only a couple two years earlier.

And Galula's handy little book, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, was a best-seller at the Leavenworth bookstore. Here are the Kill/Capture/torture ' weeds' the garrison generals want ' pulled' as if once these folks are annihilated, there will be no rebellion.

Occupation Racket: Corporations Get $$RICH$$$; Soldiers Get Dead, Maimed and Ruined for Life Having 158, 000 American troops--troops in trucks and ' boots' on the ground is NOT the best way to handle a SASO/COIN operation--LESS men say 50, 000 in well-armored TRACKS backed by separation walls and border fences--combat engineering means--otherwise we will ruin 1/3 of all the Soldiers for life and bankrupt the nation. The Joseph Stiglitz Report Nobel Prize Winner in Economics Harvard University Stiglitz report says 1/3 of our troops whenever they deploy overseas to a combat zone will be scarred for life and every 100, 000 of these equals $1 BILLION of annual VA medical care costs for the rest of their lives. 353, 000+ out of 1.6M deployed = $3.5 BILLION per year from now until at least another 40 years. If these 20-year olds live to 60ish the costs of the Iraq debacle to make corporations rich will be the current $2 BILLION/week until we leave plus $140 BILLION in VA care by 2048.

Soldier suicides could trump war tolls: U.S. Health official Mon May 5, 2008 1:11 PM ET WASHINGTON (AFP) - Suicides and ' psychological mortality' among U.S. Soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan could exceed battlefield deaths if their mental scars are left untreated, the head of the US Institute of Mental Health warned Monday. Of the 1.6 million U.S. Soldiers who have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, 18-20 percent -- or around 300,000 -- show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression or both, said Thomas Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health. An estimated 70 percent of those at-risk Soldiers do not seek help from the Department of Defense or the Veterans Administration, he told a news conference launching the American Psychiatric Association's 161st annual meeting here.

If ' one just does the math', then allowing PTSD or depression to go untreated in such numbers could result in ' suicides and psychological mortality trumping combat deaths' in Iraq and Afghanistan, Insel warned. More than 4,000 U.S. Soldiers have died in Iraq since the U.S. Invasion of 2003, and more than 400 in Afghanistan since the U.S. Led attacks there in 2001, of which some 290 were killed in action and the rest in on-combat deaths.

'It's predicted that most Soldiers -- 70 percent -- will not seek treatment through the DoD or VA,' Insel said at the meeting, at which the psychological impact of war is expected to top the agenda over the next four days. Left untreated, PTSD and depression can lead to substance abuse, alcoholism or other life-threatening behaviors.

'It's a gathering storm for the civilian and public health care sectors,' Insel said. He urged public-sector mental health caregivers to recognize the symptoms of psychological troubles resulting from deployment to a war zone and be ready to provide adequate care for both Soldiers and their families. Other items on the agenda at the meeting, set to be attended by some 19,000 psychiatrists and mental health practitioners from around the world, include violence in schools, the psychology of extremism, and more light-hearted topics such as how music affects mood. Below offers a list of major known Sunni insurgent/terror groups identified in Iraq and some very top level info about them. For some absurd reason It ignores the Shi'ite militias, the al-Qaeda ' foreign fighters' cells, and the Iranian and Saudi agents supporting ' their side.' The listing was drawn from (other) websites by the folks at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the publishers of Foreign Policy magazine and long-time apologists for the UN and its internationalist, one-worlder agenda. Www.foreignpolicy.com/resources/alert.php Foreign Policy, Posted June 19, 2006 Before the U.S.

Military killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq was the face of the insurgency. Yet his group was probably responsible for only 5-10 percent of the insurgent attacks. What about the other 90 percent? FP takes a look at the other major [Sunni] insurgent groups in Iraq--who they are, what they are trying to accomplish, and which ones are more likely to negotiate than fight to the death. Ansar Al Islam courtesy IslamOnline www.islamonline.net/english/In_Depth/Iraq_Aftermath/2003/12/ article_05.shtml First surfaced: In December 2001, before the war.

Ideology: Ansar Al Islam is a violent group of extreme Islamist fundamentalists, not unlike the Taliban in Afghanistan. With close ties to al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, the group fervently opposes the U.S. Presence in Iraq. More specifically, it rejects the U.S.-backed Patriotic Union of Kurdistan Party, which favors Kurdish self-determination and is led by the prominent Iraqi politician Jalal Talabani. Recruits: These insurgents have been among the most active in attracting members from outside Iraq.

One of their known methods has been to recruit radical, like-minded Islamists from Europe (Germany in particular) and smuggle them into Iraq. Like al Qaeda, Ansar Al Islam seeks foreign recruits not only for sheer manpower, but to demonstrate to the world that there's a steady flow of fighters willing to make the trek to Iraq to fight the coalition. However, multiple reports indicate that its makeup is overwhelmingly drawn from Kurds inside Iraq who reject the Patriotic Union.

Tactics: The group, which predominantly operates in the relatively peaceful north, is likely responsible for multiple attacks on U.S. Forces in Iraq. But unlike other insurgent organizations, it's also attempted to murder high-profile Kurdish politicians. It's rumored that Ansar Al Islam even tried to assassinate then Prime Minister Ayad Allawi during a trip to Berlin in 2004.

What's next: Even though some analysts have pointed to Ansar Al Islam for recent attacks in Fallujah, the group hasn't been as active as it was before. That could be good news for the coalition, as it indicates a weakened ability to recruit fighters from abroad. The group enjoyed close ties with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In fact, he even belonged to this organization before his incorporation into al Qaeda. So much so, that the 'treasure trove' of documents apparently uncovered by U.S. Troops in the wake of his death is likely to reveal the extent of its organization and tactical secrets. Ansar Al Sunna First surfaced: September 2003 Ideology: Ansar Al Sunna, originally an offshoot of Ansar Al Islam, is a highly feared and violent terrorist group whose worldview is most in line with al Qaeda's.

Because of the similar ideological stance, the group is said to be competing with al Qaeda for new recruits, territory, and funding. The Sunni extremists reject Western influence and interference in Muslim lands and claim to fight U.S. And coalition troops in the hope of establishing an Islamic caliphate throughout the Middle East. Virulently opposed to Shiites, Ansar Al Sunna is one of the leading contributors to the sectarian violence in recent months. Recruits: Its ranks are largely Iraqi, predominantly Kurds, with some foreign fighters from Afghanistan, Iran, and elsewhere.

As Ansar Al Islam loses strength along with al Qaeda, Ansar Al Sunna may pick up some of its leftover insurgents. Tactics: If you've seen a beheading on the Internet or watched news coverage of a large attack on coalition troops, chances are you've seen their work. Some of the highly publicized attacks include the murder of 12 Nepalese hostages in August 2004, and the killing of 17 Iraqi workers in December of that year. Ansar Al Sunna claimed responsibility for the December 2004 explosion at a U.S.

Mess hall in Mosul, which killed 22 people. As recently as June 10, the group is believed to have interrogated and executed three Iraqi police commandos. The video of their grisly deaths was posted on an Islamist Web site shortly after. What's next: Most reports about this terrorist group paint it as less concerned about killing every last American than it is about remaining intact until the coalition leaves. At that point, Ansar Al Sunna assumes it will finally have the chance to cement Islamic law into Iraqi society. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad recently stated that Ansar Al Sunna maintains a base in northwest Iran.

[EDITOR: you said earlier they violently hate Shias?] 3. Islamic Resistance Movement in Iraq (1920 Revolution Brigades) First surfaced: July 2003 Ideology: In a reference to the 1920 uprising against British colonial occupation, the 1920 Revolution Brigades is the military wing of the group once known as the Iraqi National Islamic Resistance. Like other insurgent groups, the 1920 Brigades fights to remove coalition troops from Iraq. Recruits: According to most reports, they recruit new members by handing out statements to prospective recruits at the gates of mosques after Friday prayers. The media-savvy organization has even sent tapes to Al Jazeera calling on foreign fighters to do combat in Iraq. Tactics: Most of the 1920 Revolution Brigades' attacks have focused on the area west of Baghdad, in the so-called Sunni Triangle, with major assaults on U.S.

Troops and vehicles. Roadside improvised explosive devices and rocket and mortar attacks are their modus operandi. The August 2004 attacks on two helicopters (one near Abu Ghraib and one near Fallujah) were considered major victories for the brigades. The group also claimed responsibility for the October 2005 bombing of TV station Al Arabiya's Baghdad bureau. It too has an online presence, with statements and video of its carnage transmitted through various Islamist Web sites to potential recruits and enemies. What's Next: According to the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, the brigades released a statement on Feb. 13 of this year that claimed the group would 'carry on jihad until the liberation and victory or [until they are] martyred.'

Iraqi Resistance Islamic Front (JAMI) First surfaced: May 2004 Ideology: This relatively new Sunni insurgent group appears to be a coalition of other, smaller groups with the similar political goal of removing U.S. And foreign troops from Iraq. As with many of the insurgent groups, there's plenty of evidence regarding what the group is fighting against, but not much about what it plans to do when U.S. Troops depart from Iraq.

Statements from the group reveal a highly anti-Semitic worldview, with blame attributed to Jews for everything from the occupation to the escalation in violence there. Recruits: Perhaps more than any other insurgent group, JAMI invokes the Palestinian cause and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories as a call-to-arms.

Tactics: Concentrated in Ninawa and Diyala in northern Iraq, JAMI regularly attacks the Mosul and al-Faris airports. There's also evidence that the group targets suspected U.S. Intelligence agents and infrastructure. What's next: Typical for the constantly evolving insurgency, the group is believed by several experts to have morphed into a public relations arm of some of the other groups with which it shares common cause. According to the Washington Post, the front maintains and frequently updates its Web site and even publishes a magazine called Jami to distribute to sympathizers and potential recruits.

Islamic Army in Iraq First surfaced: In 2003, shortly after coalition troops toppled Saddam Hussein's regime. Ideology: The Islamic Army in Iraq (IAI) is one of the deadliest and largest insurgent groups.

Despite its name, the IAI apparently fights more for nationalistic reasons (that is, to remove all foreign influence from Iraq) than religious ones. Recruits: This Sunni resistance group largely draws its ranks from the Baathists and paramilitary loyalists Saddam Fedayeen who lost much of their influence when Saddam fell. According to military expert Ahmed Hashim, whose new book Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq painstakingly details insurgent methods, this violent organization counts as many as 17,000 among its ranks. Tactics: The Washington Post estimates that as many of 75 percent of the group's attacks target U.S.

Troops and Iraqi contractors. Multiple reports cite a highly organized system, with different cells of fighters assigned to different tasks. Kidnappings, executions, and bombings are their trademark, and they're usually videotaped. Although keenly aware of domestic political developments in Western countries, the IAI appears to have an inflated sense of its own ability to effect change in those same countries. As Hashim notes, when the IAI kidnapped two well-known French journalists in August 2004, it demanded that the French law that banned headscarves be repealed. Likewise, when the IAI kidnapped Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni in 2004, the group demanded that Italy pull all its troops from Iraq.

Baldoni was executed when Italy refused to comply. What's next: Like JAMI, there are reports that IAI publishes a monthly magazine called al-Fursan. Although it (and other insurgent groups) adamantly denies it, rumors have swirled for a few weeks that IAI might be in the process of meeting with Iraqi and U.S.

Government officials. That, along with the calls the IAI made for nonviolence at polling places, suggests there might be some chance for negotiation. The only problem: It would be difficult for the United States and its allies to convince the rest of the world that the war was worth fighting if Saddam-style Baathists appear victorious. Afghanistan: hire Afghan Soldiers on-the-cheap to tidy up the area of Taliban weeds Here, the DoD tightwads are losing the war by not paying the Afghan Soldiers what they are worth.

At these rates it would be cheap to outbid them, as the Taliban are doing. Its time for us to put our money where our mouth is and pay the ANA Soldiers decent, better wages so they know clearly defending freedom pays. One way to do this would be by REDUCING THE CLUSTERFUCK IN IRAQ to free up monies for Afghanistan. ________________________________ London Financial Times July 26, 2006 Taliban Goes For Cash Over Ideology By Rachel Morarjee, Helmand The Taliban has found a way to recruit fighters that is less about winning hearts and minds and more about the enduring appeal of cold hard cash. They are paying fighters up to Dollars 12 (Pounds 6.50) a day to fight the fledgling Afghan National Army, which pays only Dollars 4 a day to its Soldiers in the field, according to military officials. 'The Taliban are supported by Pakistan and they get money from the drugs trade, so they get more pay than our Soldiers,' said Colonel Myuddin Ghouri of the national army's 205 Corp.

While the ANA has the advantage of superior equipment and the same medical treatment as UK troops, its Soldiers often have to risk their lives far from home. [EDITOR: why we need a RF/PF equivalent in Afghanistan] 'If you were a lad in the hills and you were offered Dollars 12 to stay local or you could take Dollars 4 and fight miles away from home, which would you do?' Said Lieutenant Colonel David Hammond, an officer with 7 Para who is training Afghan officers in the southern province of Helmand as part of a mentoring scheme. The pay difference is making it harder to recruit Soldiers to the 38,000-strong ANA, which has faced a much better equipped and funded insurgency since January. Western officials have estimated that the Taliban's forces have risen from 2,000 last year to 6,000 this year. The Taliban claims to have 12,000 men.

Afghan defence ministry officials believe funds for the insurgency are flowing over the border from Pakistan and possibly from Arab countries. [EDITOR: oil money] The multi-ethnic Afghan National Army has been one of the success stories of the post-September 11 era and is hugely popular with most Afghans. However, Afghan officials in Kabul say the pay of Afghan Soldiers will remain a problem.

'Basic pay of Dollars 70 a month was a lot of money three years ago, but it's harder to recruit people to fight in a bitter insurgency now,' said one Afghan official. [EDITOR: maybe we should have Sally Struthers go on TV commercials asking Americans to sponsor and fund an Afghan Army Soldier for a few dollars each month? Call it the 'Afghan Soldier Fund'] 1. All that energy going towards making Americans comfortable 'FOBBITs' should be going towards supplying the Iraqi Army with like the Afghans have, generators to counter snipers, barriers and civilian reconstruction. If Iraqis can't handle supplies without black market corruption, then this is reason for SOME Americans to be there.

Funds freed from Iraq should go to Afghanistan to get our troops out of flimsy tents and into, supply them, and pay the Afghan Army Soldiers far better than the Taliban thugs. At least 80, 000 FOBBIT Americans should be sent home immediately as they are doing nothing but consuming supplies and angering the impoverished Iraqis around them.

The 50, 000 Americans that remain should be living in in combat only FOBs sans all the garrison 'From Here to Eternity' crap (getting Col. Payne fired etc.) and move in up-armored M113 Gavin tracked armor. Their missions are to: a. TRAIN the Iraqis to perform a style of war (CONOPS) based on easy-to-maintain tracked armor and that picket roads and keep bombs out of city centers. SUPPLY the Iraqis c. REBUILD civilian works d. Act as a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) as needed 4.

The 50, 000 Americans should be screened for snobby, narcissistic attitudes. Those that have them should be sent home. This is further proof we need a dedicated COIN/SASO Corps of 3 divisions probably from the 25-40 age group National Guard trained not to be American egocentric snobs. EVERY company-sized unit will have a fluent Iraqi language translator and/or hand-held 'Phraselator' translation devices GSA Advantage Web site Contract Number: GS-35F-0379N. No convoy 'leaves the wire' of the FOB without having a translator on hand.

VIDEO: MULTI-NATIONAL FORCES-IRAQ Baghdad, Camp Victory, Science and Technology Advisor: 'We have tested the three newest Phraselator-type devices. Of the three we tested, the P2 was the one best understood by the Iraqi people. The other two systems translated phrases into Arabic, which was understood, but the P2 translated phrases with the Iraqi dialect, which proved to easier for the Iraqis to understand. The P2 was also the simplest to use. Soldiers figured out how to use it within one or two minutes of picking it up.'

ARMY Special Forces Operations NCO, Current Operations NCOIC: 'As for the device.what a great machine. I used the debriefing aid to interrogate former Iraqi intelligence officials. I used it a lot with teenagers and civilians to determine when and where the enemy went. I was able to use the device to get exact information on a huge weapons cache and where unexploded ordinance was.' 'And best of all, as a Special Forces Soldier, I was able to use the device to build rapport with the people of Iraq.' 'I was able to use the phrase translation device with these teenagers to find a large cache of weapons and ordinance.

They were able to debrief me on where the Soldiers where, where the command bunker was, where the Soldiers went, and what they were wearing.' 'This device was invaluable, and it assisted in protecting the team.' VoxTec International, Inc. Main: (410) 626-1110 Fax: (410) 626-1112 Toll Free: 866.4VOXTEC E-Mail: Info@VoxTec.com You see a bunch of U.S. Forces praising the Phraselator WHY IS THIS DEVICE NOT IN THE HANDS OF EVERY COMPANY-SIZED UNIT? WHAT'S THE HOLD UP?

NO MORE KILL/CAPTURE RAIDING! No more conventional unit sweeps that make more rebels than they find. If 'Special' units cannot learn to discreetly inter-mingle and surveil 'high value targets' on a surgical, rare basis, they should be sent home. Those 'Special' units that can do FID better damn well start doing it or they should be sent home, too.

We got Saddam. We got Zarqawi. Enough is enough. If the COIN/SASO Corps' leaders want kill/capture SOF units out, they go out.

The commander of the NLB-SC OR SNC-C is the regional commander like General Casey is now over his ad hoc collection of forces in the green zone in Iraq. Create an Iraqi RF/PF to PROTECT where the Army, Police and government workers live and their families from reprisals.

Rehire as much of the 300,000 fire Iraqi Army Soldiers as we can. The Iraqi RF/PFs like the heroes in the movie, 'The Magnificent Seven' are there to protect the village from the marauding bad guys. If Iraqi civil servants' homes and families are not safe from reprisals they can't go to work and do a good job restoring the country's infrastructure. Walls work: those that cannot behave,. The COIN/SASO Corps would be experts at wall and fence technologies to keep a generation of angry people away from each other. It may sadly take an entire generation to die off before a new generation is willing to live in peace since once people have lost loved ones the bitterness can go with them to the grave. We refused to rehire the strong Iraqi Army after toppling the Saddam regime, the ONLY glue holding the 3 factions together.

In Japan, the Emperor held the people under control even AFTER the WW2 militarists were defeated. General MacArthur with a dose of humility chose to keep the Emperor and the civil populace obeyed his orders to not rebel. For the invasion of Iraq, the Bush/Rummy/Wolfowitz 'looneycon' team decided they couldn't trust the liberal Democrat State Department for reconstruction so they decided to do it themselves. During this 'amateur hour' they never realized that there is a point where if you remove the only glue holding a nation-state's violently opposed factions together, THE CIVIL WAR YOU UNLEASH WILL BE BEYOND YOUR ABILITY TO QUELL SHORT OF ANNIHILATING WHOLE GROUPS (Roman Legion or Asad style)--which would create a cycle of violence and revenge that would never end until the current generation died off and somehow the newer generation didn't pick up the torch of hate. Now our best option is to PHYSICALLY separate the misbehaving factions (walls, partitions, security fences) since we've only built a new, weak Iraqi army. Having a COIN/SASO adept at these matters under DoD funding and control could prevent this from happening again. We are now 0-2.

(Vietnam and Iraq). Our presence then needs to be reduced, reduced, reduced and reduced to just training/advisory duties discreetly done. London Daily Telegraph July 22, 2006 Violence May Bring Partition Of Baghdad By Oliver Poole, Iraq Correspondent Iraq's politicians were reported yesterday to be drawing up provisional plans to divide Baghdad into Sunni and Shia halves after a week of bloodshed that has left the government's security plan to pacify the capital in tatters. The proposal would mean an acceptance that the country could not be held together and would mark a dramatic failure for the American policy of fostering national unity.

The Tigris river, which would become the dividing line between the predominately Sunni districts of west Baghdad and the majority Shia in the east. 'The parties have moved to Plan B,' a government official said yesterday.

'Iraq as a political project is finished.' While no members of the cabinet confirmed the existence of the plan, other politicians said they had learnt of the proposal. 'We have received information of a plan to divide Baghdad,' said Rida Jawad al-Takki, a senior member of the dominant Shia Alliance.

' The government is incapable of solving the situation. The situation is terrifying and black.' A month ago, United States commanders were talking of their belief that flooding Baghdad with 50,000 American and Iraqi troops would wrest control from the sectarian gunmen who increasingly terrorise its streets. But recent days have brought such a dramatic rise in the number of killings and lawlessness that a western diplomat privately admitted that the situation was close to anarchy.

Even an extended daytime curfew yesterday failed to stop the bloodshed as a bomb exploded near a Sunni mosque, injuring four people. Five people, including two women and a child, were killed as U.S. Troops raided a northern neighbourhood. Eighteen people died in fighting between Iraqi Soldiers and Shia Muslims in Mahmoudiya, a city south of Baghdad.

This week the United Nations and U.S. Military published reports that appeared to confirm anecdotal evidence from Iraqis themselves that the situation had reached new depths of brutality.

The UN said that about 100 people a day were dying across the country and that around 16,000 had been killed since the start of the year. The Baghdad mortuary said it was receiving 50 bodies a day compared with 24 to 26 each day a year ago. Admitted that the government's security plan to pacify Baghdad -Operation Together Forward - that, six weeks ago, saw 7,200 American troops and 42,500 members of the Iraqi security forces step up operations, had caused only a 'slight down tick' in the violence. In its first 30 days, said Maj Gen William Caldwell, the number of attacks in Baghdad had averaged 23.7 a day.

For the previous three months the average was 23.8. But there was a 40 per cent increase in the past week as the number of attacks jumped to 34.4 a day. Dozens of corpses have been found dumped in wastelands and there are daily reports of bombings and mortar attacks. The main source of the killing is sectarianism as antagonism between the Shia and Sunni communities - sparked by the bombing in February of the Golden Mosque, in Samarra, a revered Shia shrine - is spurred on by an ever bloodier cycle of tit-for-tat killings and sectarian cleansing in mixed areas. The division between Baghdad's west and east is not a clean-cut one, with large pockets of both communities on both sides. Forced separation would likely result in an urban war, potentially resembling Beirut in the 1970s. Walls Working in Iraq--NOT troop surging and presence patrolling Niva is a whiner.

The consent of the governed must be had. The Maliki government must be replaced by a legitimately elected government in fair elections. However, he doesn't get it: IRAQ IS A WAR AGAINST THE CAR BOMB AND LAND MINE; even if every single U.S. Soldier left within the next 24 hours, IF THE FREE FLOW OF HIGH EXPLOSIVES IS NOT STOPPED BY SEPARATION WALLS AND CHECKPOINTS Iraq will continue to be a blood bath as the internal factions kill each other. Kudos to the U.S. Military for finally doing its damn job of understanding what needs to be done to SMOTHER HEs. Now its on senior officials to get off their tails and use this lull to hold REAL elections, replace the Maliki puppet government and stop using Iraq as a corporate feeding frenzy for cheap oil, security and reconstruction contracts paid by the U.S.

ONE or two large military bases in the rural south of Iraq might be OK, a mobile, off-shore base (MOB) in the Indian ocean would be far better by being 7 mph mobile than a land base that if done wrong creates civilian population rebellion. Www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgft_gqchA Now if we would FULLY emulate the Israelis into TRACKED armored fighting vehicles with the High-Technology, up-armored, hybrid-electric drive, band-tracked M113 Gavin as the MINIMUM STANDARD on the non-linear battlefield (NLB) we would be even better prepared to smother SNC violence. We could teach the Israelis a thing or two on observation/attack aircraft by the unmanned/manned combat air vehicle (U/MCAV) so we don't go broke pissing away UAVs at a 50% crash rate. ************************************ The New Walls of Baghdad By Steve Niva 21 April 2008 Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5162 The new ' surge' strategy in Iraq, led by General David Petreaus, has been heavily marketed as an example of the U.S. Military's application of the ' lessons of history' from previous counterinsurgencies to Iraq, foremost among them the need to win the population over from insurgents through cultivating human relationships, addressing popular grievances and providing security. Yet one glance at the realities on the ground in Iraq today reveals that the cornerstone of current U.S.

Military strategy is less about cultivating human [ED: high explosive] relationships than about limiting them, primarily through concrete walls and checkpoints. And it has been less about minimizing violence than containing Iraq's population and redirecting the battlefield from the streets to the skies above Iraq. While the coffee klatches between marine commanders and Sunni tribal sheikhs may garner all the publicity, the real story on the ground in Iraq is that from Baghdad to Mosul, the U.S. Military has been busy constructing scores of concrete walls and barriers between and around Iraqi neighborhoods, which it terms ' Gated Communities.' In Baghdad alone, 12-foot-high walls now separate and surround at least eleven Sunni and Shiite enclaves. Broken by narrow checkpoints where Soldiers monitor traffic via newly issued ID cards, these walls have turned Baghdad into dozens of replica Green Zones, dividing neighbor from neighbor and choking off normal commerce and communications. Similar walls are being erected in other Iraqi cities, while the entire city of Falluja remains surrounded by a razor-wire barrier, with only one point of entry into the city.

Moreover, the U.S. Military has doubled its use of unmanned aerial drones and increasingly relies upon aerial strikes to quell insurgent activities, often through bombings and targeted assassinations. While there is no question that overall levels of violence have temporarily decreased, Iraq has become virtually caged in a carapace of concrete walls and razor wire, reinforced by an aerial occupation from the sky.

Reporting from a recent visit to the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, the seasoned journalist Nir Rosen noted in Rolling Stone (March 6, 2008) that: ' Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded 'surge,' Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood.' The Israeli Laboratory The explosion of walls and enclaves reinforced by aerial violence across Iraq suggest that the primary counterinsurgency lessons being followed by the U.S. Military in Iraq today derive less from the lessons of ' Lawrence of Arabia' than from Israel's experiences in the Occupied Palestinian Territories over the past decade.

Over the past decade, Israel has developed a pacification strategy against Palestinian resistance to its military occupation by erecting separation walls and checkpoints across Palestinian territory that has enclosed Palestinians within a proliferating archipelago of ethnic enclaves to separate them from each other and from illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. This wall and enclave strategy is maintained under a blanket of aerial Israeli surveillance and deadly unmanned drones, which target the frequent airborne assassinations and strikes.

This strategy reached its apotheosis in Gaza following Israel's withdrawal of its Soldiers and settlements in 2005. In Gaza, 1.5 million Palestinians are now living within an enclosed cage, while Israel controls access to the essentials of life through high-tech border terminals and unleashes ' penetration raids' and airborne ' targeted killings' when resistance is offered. Iraq, it seems, is surging towards Gaza. This fact is not missed by average Iraqis. Visiting the Sunni bastion of Amriya in Baghdad, Nir Rosen in The Nation (April 3, 2008) recounts how his Iraqi driver pointed to a gap in the concrete walls with which the U.S.

Occupation forces have surrounded Amriya: 'We call it the Rafah Crossing.' He was referring to the one gate from besieged Gaza to Egypt that the Israeli army occasionally allows to open. Military's virtual reproduction of distinctively Israeli counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq reveals that claims about applying the ' lessons of history' of counterinsurgent warfare to Iraq are largely beside the point. The actual application of counterinsurgency on the ground in Iraq has a distinctly Israeli DNA, born of very recent lessons from Israel's own urban warfare laboratory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This should not be surprising. The Israeli DNA in the new ' surge' strategy is only the latest manifestation of a widely overlooked but unmistakable American predilection to increasingly draw from Israel's urban warfare laboratory and its flawed efforts to devise fresh tactics in the service of rebooting its own military occupation of Palestinian lands. What we are seeing in Iraq today has much less to do with the declared shift in U.S.

Military doctrine than with a deeper and more far-reaching ' Israelization' of U.S. Military strategy and tactics over the past two decades that was only heightened by America's misadventures in the Middle East after September 11, 2001. In the search for new means to confront urban insurgencies in predominately Arab and Muslim lands, there has been a complex institutional and cultural harmonization between these two militaries under the banner of fighting ' the war on terror,' though the traffic is mostly in one direction. In light of the real lessons of counterinsurgency history, however, mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure. The ' Israelization' of U.S. Military Doctrine and Tactics This ' Israelization' of U.S. Military doctrine and tactics can be traced back to the early 1990's, especially the ' Blackhawk down' debacle of 1993 in Somalia, which led U.S.

Military strategists to rethink their approach to fighting urban warfare in poor Third World ' battle spaces.' In the following years, according to urban theorist Mike Davis in his 2004 article ' The Pentagon as Global Slum Lord,' Israeli advisors were brought in to teach marines, Rangers and Navy SEALs the state-of-the-art tactics against urban insurgencies that Israel was using to ruthlessly suppress Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. This tactical ' Israelization' of U.S. Combat doctrine was accompanied by what Davis terms a deeper strategic ' Sharonization' (referring to Israeli militarist and later Prime Minister Ariel Sharon) of the Pentagon's worldview in which U.S. Military strategists began to envision the capacity of high-tech warfare to contain and possibly defeat insurgencies rooted in third world urban environments. Sharon is known to have kept by his bedside a well-thumbed Hebrew edition of Alistair's Horne's A Savage War of Peace, an account of the failed French effort to defeat the Algerian insurgency against French colonial occupation. While many viewed the French defeat as proof of the futility of military solutions to anti-colonial insurgencies, Sharon's belief was that Israel could learn from Algeria to get right what the French did not.

In 2001, the journalist Robert Fisk reported, Sharon told French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac in a phone conversation that the Israelis were ' like you in Algeria,' the only difference being that ' we [the Israelis] will stay.' The ' Israelization' of U.S. Military doctrine and tactics since the attacks on September 11, 2001, has gone so far as to create what the Palestinian academic Marwan Bishara, writing in Al-Ahram Weekly (April-May, 2002), has termed a new ' strategic cult' in which Israel's ' asymmetrical war' against the Palestinians became seen as a continuation of the U.S. ' war on terrorism' in both theory and practice.

Learning from Israel's experiences centered on the need for new precision weaponry and a tactical emphasis on aerial assassinations and armored bulldozers, as well as other elements of Israel's fighting style in the new ' asymmetrical' and urban battle spaces. According to The Independent's Justin Huggler (March 29, 2003) Israel's unprecedented assault on Palestinian cities and the refugee camp in Jenin during ' Operation Defensive Shield' in April 2002 was keenly observed by foreign militaries, particularly the United States and UK as they geared up to invade and occupy Iraq. But the most direct application of the Israeli tutorial took place in Iraq, particularly after the U.S. Found itself mired in a growing insurgency in an occupied country, confronting urban guerilla warfare and suicide bombings in Fall, 2003. Having banished counterinsurgency doctrine from its own playbook after Vietnam, the Pentagon turned to Israel.

According to the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writing in The New Yorker (December 15, 2003), ' One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America's closest ally in the Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq.

Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers - again, in secret - when full-field operations begin.' Hence, American forces increasingly used a new set of tactics that appeared to have come straight out of the Israeli playbook from the occupied Palestinians territories, including physically enclosing villages within razor-wire fences, bulldozing homes of suspected insurgents, destroying irrigation systems and agricultural fields, taking civilian hostages and using torture to extract intelligence. Seymour Hersh claims that the U.S. Was told it had to ' go unconventional' like the Israelis - to use harsh tactics to counter the harsh insurgency such as deploying assassination squads. As he summarized it: ' The American-Israeli liaison on Iraq amounts to a tutorial on how to dismantle an insurgency.' According to Julian Borger at the Guardian (December 9, 2003) one former senior American intelligence official raised serious concerns about the dangers of adopting Israel's ' hunter-killer' teams, and the political implications of such an open embrace of Israel: 'It is bonkers, insane. Here we are - we're already being compared to Sharon in the Arab world and we've just confirmed it by bringing in the Israelis and setting up assassination teams.'

The ' Surge': Shifting Tactics in Iraq, Israeli-Style The Israeli tutorial, as we know, was nothing less than a complete failure, as Iraq slipped into anarchy and then raging civil war in large part as a result of the destructive tactics deployed the U.S. As a consequence, the failures in Iraq forced the U.S. Military to reconsider the pre-eminence of harsh Israeli-style tactics.

And so in late 2006, Gen. David Petraeus and his highly touted cadre of counterinsurgency (COIN) experts, fresh from a six-month command and staff course at Fort Leavenworth that according to The Independent's Robert Fisk (April 11, 2007) included at least four senior Israeli officers, ushered in a heavily marketed new counterinsurgency strategy that reduced the reliance upon brute military force in favor of creating alliances with former insurgents, building intelligence capacity, and restoring a semblance of security for the population, particularly in Baghdad. But it would be a mistake to read this new ' hearts and minds' counterinsurgency strategy as a full-scale retreat from ' Israelization' in two important respects, both of which illustrate how remarkably similar American and Israeli strategic and tactical frameworks have become at this point in time. First, it is striking how much the new U.S. Approach in Iraq mirrors Israel's own tactical response to its failed attempt to use harsh and brutal tactics to crush the renewed surge of Palestinian resistance between 2001 and 2004.

In 2004, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unveiled a new strategy - what he termed ' disengagement' - as a new way to ' shift the narrative.' This strategy included the tactical withdrawal of Israeli settlements and Soldiers from the Gaza Strip to be replaced by its complete encirclement and economic strangulation, while further enclosing Palestinians in the West Bank within separation walls, barriers and checkpoints. Whereas the previous approach relied upon aggressive Israeli military incursions within Palestinian areas, the new strategy seeks to control Palestinians from beyond their walled-off enclosures by selectively controlling access to life essentials and relying on air-strikes to quell resistance.

Similarly, in response to the chaos in Iraq and the growing popular demand for a U.S. Withdrawal from Iraq in late 2006, President Bush and the U.S. Military adopted the ' surge' strategy as its own way to ' change the narrative.' As in the Israeli case, the ' surge' has shifted techniques of domination across Iraq from the direct application of violence against insurgents to indirect spatial incarceration, multiplying archipelagos of externally alienated and internally homogenous ethno-national enclaves through walls and checkpoints, under a blanket of aerial surveillance. Secondly, the tactical shift towards walls, enclaves and aerial domination is still rooted in the ' Sharonization' of U.S. Strategic doctrine mentioned earlier; that is, the belief that one can use military force to defeat an insurgency by reformulating one's military tactics. Neither Israel nor the United States are willing to countenance a serious political solution to either occupation, which would entail addressing the core political issue that is driving each insurgency: ending the foreign occupation.

As it happens, Henry Kissinger is reported to have given President Bush a copy of Horne's A Savage War of Peace to read in the winter of 2006, and the U.S. Military frequently uses the Algerian case as one its primary lessons in most COIN training. They appear to have learned the same faulty lessons as Sharon. Both Israel and the U.S. Are seeking to replace direct military occupation with a form of occupation management in order to preserve the fruits of their respective occupations. Israel has simply shifted tactics to achieve its original goal of securing its illegal settlements and land confiscations in the West Bank to maintain 'greater Israel.' Since it is unwilling to accept a withdrawal to the 1967 borders and allow for a fully sovereign Palestinian state, its strategy is to pacify Palestinians through ever confining walls and enclaves until Palestinians accept their fate living in splintered enclaves under complete Israeli control.

Similarly, since the U.S. Is unwilling to negotiate with the insurgency or implement a timetable for withdrawal, it is clear that the new counterinsurgency plan is an effort to pacify Iraq into accepting a form of ' soft partition' into ethno-political enclaves to enable the U.S. To secure its original goals of establishing permanent military bases, securing access to Iraq's vast oil fields, and installing an Iraqi central government to pass laws to ensure these aims. Like the Palestinians, Iraqis will be sequestered within walled enclaves so that the political and economic occupation can remain in place. The Real ' Lessons of History' for Iraq Needless to say, all this amounts to trying to find new ways to do the impossible. The bottom line is that both Israel and the U.S.

Will be losers in their quest for military solutions to fundamentally political insurgencies against a foreign military occupation. Framing an occupation as ' liberation' or ' counter-terrorism' does not make it any less a foreign occupation. One of the great ironies in all of this is the willful failure of both Israel and the United States to learn the fundamental historical lesson of the French in Algeria: that they could have negotiated a withdrawal far earlier and spared all this bloodshed and violence--assuming that peace is what they want and not bloodshed for profit, depopulation and divide-thy-enemies reasons. Walls Work: Baghdad Finally Decides Enough High Explosives Bloodshed is Enough AMEN: We have Been Calling for This for Years!!!! This is what you do to keep HIGH EXPLOSIVE bombs out of city centers. We're sorry, but all the whiners about ' men need to make us safe' need to STFU--they don't know what they are talking about vis-a-vis PHYSICAL REALITY--which is far too vast to assign 'men' to be everywhere all the time with x-ray vision (which they don't have) to see every car and person if they have a (HE) bomb. Sorry, if this busts kinetic energy bullet gunslinger egos.

Enough is enough. This is for the thousands of people murdered and maimed needlessly due to U.S./Iraqi military/police narcissist incompetence.

At least they finally got it right--after thousands of body bags. The governor of Baghdad is a hero--and a humanitarian. Mike Sparks www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article7129217.ece From The Times May 18, 2010 Baghdad to enclose city with 15ft wall to keep suicide bombers out Motorists get a taste of things to come as traffic is delayed during construction of the first of eight gateways into the city Oliver August, Baghdad Baghdad is to resort to one of the oldest forms of defence by building a massive wall around the capital to keep out insurgents, The Times has learnt. A series of recent suicide bombings has driven the governor of the Iraqi capital to propose the concrete barrier, which will be 15 foot (4.5 meters) high and 70 miles (112 kilometers) long.

Every man, beast and vehicle entering will be searched at one of only eight gates along the main highways. Baghdad, roughly the same size as London and with approximately five million inhabitants, will face severe disruption as a result. Freedom of movement will be limited and workers and visitors alike will probably have to wait for at least an hour to enter. Once inside, though, it is hoped they will be much safer. Shatha al-Obeidi, an aide to Salah Abdul Razzaq, the governor, said: ' We want to stop the terrorist from sneaking in. With the wall it will be much easier.' Building work is expected to take about a year.

Once the wall is completed, officials plan to remove most of the 1,500 checkpoints and many miles of cement blast barriers that have sprung up inside Baghdad over the past few years. ' We have become a city filled with concrete,' said Ms al-Obeidi. ' That will change.' Related Links 102 dead as bombers fill Iraqi power vacuum The forgotten four: kidnapped in 2006 but families still wait Iran-backed bloc tries to take power in Iraq To keep costs down, many of the blast walls may simply be moved from central Baghdad to the outskirts and become part of the exterior wall.

Paperport 11 Serial Number Crack Adobe on this page. The eight city gates will be set up as service stations for travelers, with restaurants and stores on the inner side. Cars will be searched across ten-lane highways from 6am until midnight.

The city remains under a night-time curfew. Construction is to be supervised by the Baghdad Operations Command, the anti-terrorism cell that reports directly to the Prime Minister. It will also run the checkpoints, aided by an American-designed computer system holding the fingerprints of known insurgents.

Qasim Atta, a member of the command, said that the wall was ' a great way to improve security'. Where the city borders agricultural areas, a moat may be substituted. Surveillance cameras and unmanned reconnaissance aircraft will also be in use, officials said. Construction has apparently already begun.

' The Baghdad governorate has started building the security wall which will surround the capital and separate it from the surrounding provinces,' Mr. American officials believe that many of the explosives-laden cars were prepared and brought in from farming communities outside the city. Baghdad is not a stranger to the concept of a city wall.

Founded in AD 762 as a large circular compound, it was initially surrounded by ramparts 30 meters high, with four gates, numerous guard towers and a moat. That, however, did not stop the Mongols from sacking the city in 1258. Baghdad residents have mixed feelings about living in a giant gated community.

Many doubt the effectiveness of the wall, having seen so many other security measures fail. Fallah al-Azawi, a former army officer, said: ' I don't think a wall will bring any good. Baghdad can only be protected by its men.'

[EDITOR: Oh, bullshit. You are out-of-work and want perpetual employment for egotists running around with rifles--WHICH DOES NOT WORK. 7 years of 'men' failing is enough.

Time for HUMILITY and COMBAT ENGINEERING.] Oday Ghafori, a vegetable market worker, said: ' Even animals are not treated like this. And what about the sky?

Why don't they cover Baghdad from above?' [EDITOR: let's hear her complain about the mangled and dead human and animal bodies ' mistreated' by car and people-clad bombs] Others, however, were very much in favour of the idea. For years, they have lived in what the American military call the red zone, while diplomats and officials have been cloistered in the green zone: a few square miles of central Baghdad protected by its own walls and barbed wire. ' This will make all of Baghdad into a green zone,' said Said Modhar Yahya, an accountant. [EDITOR: BINGO! So don't knock it!] MUST-SEE VIDEO: The Battle of Algiers (Entire Film): Don't Delay Political Settlement www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=8691CC9B818981A6 Militarily, the French army did not lose - they certainly won the Battle of Algiers and had pacified the country by late 1958.

But the military victory was hollow. The French achieved pacification only, which simply meant that the number of violent incidents per month was at a tolerable level. But this came at the price of herding over a million Algerians into fortified villages, extensive torture, and millions killed. This was a situation that could not be sustained and it unraveled as open warfare broke out between settlers and Algerians with the French army caught in the middle, battling both. All of this looks very much like Iraq today with Americans caught between Shia and Sunni militias, battling both in an effort to achieve pacification on behalf of an ineffective puppet government associated with its occupation.

There are also obvious parallels to Israel's predicament in the occupied Palestinian territories. The primary reason why the French military victory was hollow was because the French offered no political solution that met the core aspirations of Algerian nationalism, which should be clear to anyone who reads the second half of A Savage War of Peace. They only offered a flimsy notion of ' self-determination' and ' democracy' that De Gaulle called ' association,' which we recognize today as a neo-colonial relationship. France sought to maintain exterritorial control through military bases and dominion over Algerian oil resources, including a permanent French settler presence.

The Algerians rejected this and fought until the French were forced to leave entirely. The parallels with U.S. Plans for Iraq hardly need to be elaborated. Instead of learning from the French experience, the U.S.

Has naively looked to the Israeli experience as a training manual for counterinsurgency. Continues to be mesmerized by a mythical version of Israel that is based more on savvy marketing than demonstrated performance. Israel's responses to unconventional war has never been well developed or very successful; it was defeated by Hezbollah in South Lebanon not once but twice, and its attempt to crush the Palestinian uprising through force actually led to further suicide bombings, while its destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure has left the political field open to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure.

Martin Van Creveld, an Israeli military historian who had lectured U.S. Military officials on Israeli military strategy in late 2003, warned in an Associated Press article (December 12, 2003) that just as Israel had been unsuccessful in eliminating militant groups and suicide bombers, the United States cannot expect to be victorious in Iraq. ' The Americans are coming here to try to mimic all kinds of techniques, but it's not going to do them any good,' he reportedly warned. ' I don't see how on earth they (the U.S.) can win. I think this is going to end the same way Vietnam did. They are going to flee the country hanging on the strings of helicopters.' Whether or not this happens will be the subject of future ' lessons of history.'

But by following the Israeli model rather than the actual lessons of counterinsurgency history, the U.S. Appears trapped by the logic of its own image co-dependency with Israel as a state now permanently at war with much of the Arab and Muslim world, with history's lessons decidedly not on its side.

Read correctly, A Savage War of Peace is less a user's manual for counterinsurgency than a warning about the futility of fighting colonial wars in the first place. Steve Niva is a professor of Middle East Studies and International Politics at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA and is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. He is currently writing a book on the relationship between Israeli military violence and Palestinian suicide bombings. One War futurist who agrees that we need a specialized force for COIN/SASO is Thomas Barnett. The Pentagon's New Map The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century is a 2004 book by Thomas Barnett based around an earlier article he wrote for Esquire magazine. It outlines a new grand strategy for American foreign policy. It is an iteration of a PowerPoint presentation that Barnett has been making for years that is known simply as 'The Brief.'

Interested parties include the public and private sectors, encompassing military organizations and foreign governments. At least two versions of Barnett's presentation have aired on C-SPAN as of 2005. In December 2004, the network broadcast one of Barnett's recent presentations followed with a live call-in program in which Barnett discussed his book and its effects. See the article on Barnett for an outline of his ideas. Barnett was asked by the United States Air Force to give the presentation to every new officer who attained the rank of General. In late 2004, Barnett's employer (the Naval War College) gave him the choice of either writing the second book or retaining his job.

He chose the former, and wrote Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating. Barnett also continues to write articles as a contributing editor at Esquire and consult on global security issues as a senior managing director at Enterra Solutions. He is currently in the planning stages of a third book on Resiliency with co-author Stephen DeAngelis, founder of Enterra Solutions. Key ideas: 1.

Systems of rules called Rule-sets reduce violent conflict. Violence decreases as rules are established (e.g., the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding) for dealing with international conflicts. The world can be roughly divided into two groups: the Functioning Core, characterized by economic interdependence, and the Non-Integrated Gap, characterized by unstable leadership and absence from international trade. The Core can be sub-divided into Old Core (North America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia) and New Core (China, India). The Disconnected Gap includes the Middle East, South Asia (except India), most of Africa, Southeast Asia, and northwest South America. Integration of the Gap countries into the global economy will provide opportunities for individuals living in the Gap to improve their lives, thereby presenting a desirable alternative to violence and terrorism.

The US military is the only force capable of providing the military support to facilitate this integration by serving as the last ditch rule-enforcer. Barnett argues that it has been doing so for over 20 years by 'exporting' security (U.S. Spends about half of the world's total in military spending). To be successful the U.S. Military must stop thinking of war in the context of war but war in the context of 'everything else', i.e. Demographics, energy, investment, security, politics, trade, immigration, etc. In recognition of its dual role, the U.S.

Military should organize itself according to two functions, the 'Leviathan' and the 'System Administrator.' * Leviathan's purpose is employ overwhelming force to end violence quickly. It will take out governments, defend Core countries, and generally do the deterrence work that the US military has been doing since the end of WWII.

The Leviathan force is primarily staffed by young aggressive personnel and is overwhelmingly American. * * The SysAdmin's purpose is to wage peace: peacekeeping, nation building, strengthening weak governments, etc. The SysAdmin force is primarily staffed by older, more experienced personnel, though not entirely (he would put the marines in SysAdmin as the ' Mini-me Leviathan').

The sys Admin force would work best as a Core-wide phenomenon. By exporting security, the US and the rest of the Core benefit from increased trade, increased international investment, and other benefits. Books * Thomas P.M. Barnett (April 22, 2004). The Pentagon's New Map. Putnam Publishing Group. ISBN 0-399-15175-3 * * Thomas P.M.

Barnett (October 20, 2005). Blueprint for Action. Putnam Publishing Group. ISBN 0-399-15312-8 External links * Barnett homepage * Google's Gapminder WSJ EXCERPT: Vann vs. Harkins, all over again! 'He and fellow advisers say U.S.

Troops on the American side of the base saddle Iraqis with the least-desirable missions and often fail to provide them with the basics they need to protect themselves against insurgent attacks. 'They treat the Iraqis with utter scorn and contempt,' Col. 'The Iraqis may not be sophisticated, but they aren't stupid. They see it.'

' Wall Street Journal June 17, 2006 Pg. 1 A Camp Divided As U.S. Tries to give Iraqi troops more responsibility, clash of two American colonels shows tough road ahead. By Greg Jaffe Camp Taji, Iraq--This sprawling military base is divided down the middle by massive concrete barriers, a snaking fence and rifle-toting guards. On one side, about 10,000 U.S. Army Soldiers live in air-conditioned trailers. There's a movie theater, a swimming pool, a Taco Bell, and a post exchange the size of a Wal-Mart, stocked with everything from deodorant to DVD players.

On the other side are a similar number of Iraqi Soldiers whose success will determine when U.S. Troops can go home. The Iraqi troops live in fetid barracks built by the British in the 1920s, ration the fuel they use to run their lights and sometimes eat spoiled food that makes them sick.

The only Soldiers who pass regularly between the two worlds are about 130 U.S. Army advisers, who live, train and work with the Iraqis. For many of these advisers, the past six months have been a disorienting experience, putting them at odds with their fellow U.S. Soldiers and eroding their confidence in the U.S. Government's ability to build an Iraqi force that can stabilize this increasingly violent country. Army commanders back in the U.S. 'told us this was going to be the most thankless and frustrating job we have ever held, and boy, were they right,' says Lt.

Charles Payne, who until last month oversaw about 50 Army advisers. He and fellow advisers say U.S. Troops on the American side of the base saddle Iraqis with the least-desirable missions and often fail to provide them with the basics they need to protect themselves against insurgent attacks. 'They treat the Iraqis with utter scorn and contempt,' Col. 'The Iraqis may not be sophisticated, but they aren't stupid. They see it.' James Pasquarette, who commands most of the Soldiers on the U.S.

Side of Camp Taji, calls those claims 'totally ridiculous.' He says he's proud of what the Iraqi units have achieved in the region and has made supporting them his top priority, after ensuring his own troops have the protection they need. But he worries that if the Iraqis are given too much latitude to execute challenging missions too quickly, they will alienate Iraqi civilians with heavy-handed tactics. Payne and his fellow advisers have 'gone native.' Though the divide here at Camp Taji is extreme, it reflects a growing friction throughout this war-torn country. No one on either side of the divide expects the Iraqi troops to be trained, equipped or housed to U.S. Troops are going to go home, U.S.

Commanders must allow Iraqis to take a far greater role in planning operations and taking the fight to the enemy, senior military officers say. Right now, Iraqi commanders and some of their U.S. Advisers say that isn't happening enough. Part of the reason, U.S.

Officials say, is that widespread Iraqi corruption has made it hard for the fledgling Iraqi government to supply their troops with basics like good food, batteries and fuel. But Iraqi Soldiers and their U.S.

Advisers say the problem extends beyond basic supply issues. They complain that U.S. Troops, bunkered down on large, fortified bases, treat Iraqi forces more like a problem than a partner. Forces 'don't talk to us,' says Col. Saad, a senior Iraqi commander on Camp Taji. The Iraqi colonel, whose family has been threatened by insurgents, asked that his full name not be used. Commanders counter that there are huge risks to giving the Iraqi army too big a role right now.

They worry some Iraqis will leak word of impending operations to the enemy or use military force to settle sectarian scores. Commanders say Iraqi forces aren't as disciplined as U.S. Troops and are too prone to abuse civilians and detainees. The debate raises difficult questions for U.S. Commanders, as they plot the way forward in Iraq: Should Iraqi units be held to the same standards as U.S.

What happens when the Iraqis' solution is at odds with the American commander's strategy? Earlier this spring, the tension between the two sides at Camp Taji reached the breaking point when the Iraqi army brigade that Col. Payne was advising leveled two dozen roadside kiosks. The Iraqi Soldiers said insurgent snipers, who had killed and wounded Iraqi troops, used the kiosks for cover.

Pasquarette thought destroying the kiosks would only enrage locals and drive them to support the insurgents. 'This was a great day for the terrorists,' he recalls telling Col. Payne on the day that the Iraqi army flattened the fruit and vegetable stands. Payne says the Iraqi army bulldozed the kiosks -- consisting mostly of palm fronds suspended by bamboo poles -- to protect Iraqi Soldiers. 'When I first heard what they had done, my initial response was, 'I am all for it,' ' Col.

'This is not a law and order situation. This is a war.' Late last month, Col.

Pasquarette asked that Col. Payne be dismissed from his position, just four months after the two men started working together. Payne was then assigned to a desk job in Baghdad. The unit Col.

Payne headed is at the leading edge of a major shift in U.S. Until last summer, the U.S. Military saw its primary mission as fighting insurgents. With pressure mounting to bring the 130,000 U.S. Troops in Iraq home, President Bush decided the military's main effort should instead focus on training Iraqis to take its place. To speed development of Iraqi army forces, about 3,000 U.S.

Soldiers were placed with Iraqi units throughout the country. The teams live and work with Iraqi Soldiers in places such as Camp Taji. In November 2005, Col. Payne came back from retirement to lead his team. The colonel had served 28 years in the Army, fought in the and taught history at West Point. He retired in July 2001.

A few weeks later, terrorists struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Payne called the Army and volunteered to return.

'There was a chuckle on the end of the phone,' he says. The Army told him he wasn't needed. Four years later, with the Army stretched thin by the war, the 50-year-old Soldier, who was teaching at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, called again.

This time, the Army was eager to send him to Iraq. In November, he was told he had 23 days to report to Fort Carson, Colo., and link up with his unit.

His wife was 'very unhappy,' he says. Payne says he was determined to go. 'The nation is at war and all real Soldiers want to be where the action is.' Pasquarette, a former college basketball player, took command of his 6,000-Soldier brigade in June 2005. Before that, the 45-year-old had attended Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon and served as an aide-de-camp to a four-star general. The two men's troops arrived in Iraq in December 2005 and settled on opposite sides of Camp Taji, a sprawling former Iraqi army base, about 20 miles north of Baghdad. Payne's group consisted of 50 U.S.

Soldiers, assigned to advise the Iraqi military. His team was one of the few at Camp Taji that didn't report to Col.

The 2,500-Soldier Iraqi brigade that Col. Payne was advising had formed 11 months earlier and had been fighting nonstop.

The Iraqis had scrounged all of their tanks and armored personnel carriers -- most of which were at least 30 years old -- from a massive junkyard on the Iraqi side of Camp Taji. When something broke, Iraqi Soldiers retreated to the scrapyard where they would pillage rusting hulks for spare parts. Of the $260 billion spent on the Iraq war since 2003, about $10 billion has gone to build Iraqi army and police forces. Officers bonded quickly with their Iraqi counterparts. In January, Maj.

Michael Jason, who leads one of the advisory teams, was on patrol with a 42-year-old Iraqi colonel when a terrified farmer told them he had found bodies in a field. He then led them to the corpses of 11 Iraqi army Soldiers who had been headed home on leave. Each had been beaten, blindfolded and shot in the head. Their Iraqi army identification cards had been taken from their wallets and pinned to their shirts by insurgents who regularly target Iraqi forces. Jason, a Roman Catholic, and his Iraqi counterpart, Col. Khalid, a Muslim, kneeled next to the bodies and prayed.

Army asked that Col. Khalid's full name be withheld for his safety. That night, Maj. Jason, a 33-year-old West Point grad, wrote an email home describing his Iraqi colleague's bravery and sacrifice. Khalid's children have to move constantly for fear of their lives. When he goes home on leave, he cannot tell anyone for security reasons. He just disappears.

He drives 90 mph with a pistol tucked in the small of his back and his ID hidden. I love these guys, no s-t,' he wrote.

A month later, Col. Khalid's brother, also an army officer, was kidnapped. Insurgents killed him and dumped his body on his parents' doorstep. Khalid couldn't go to the funeral for fear that he would be assassinated. Jason and Soldiers in the unit mourned with him at Camp Taji. In March, Col.

Khalid left the battalion for a safer assignment, which doesn't require him to leave the base. Advisers grew closer to the Iraqis, they also grew more frustrated with U.S. Soldiers on the other side of the base. Shortly after Col. Pasquarette arrived at Camp Taji, he beefed up the number of guards and armored vehicles at the gates separating the U.S. And Iraqi sides of the base.

'Securing my [base] is my No. I am risk averse here,' he says. Advisers to the Iraqis thought the additional guards and guns were unnecessary and only served to make U.S. Soldiers more suspicious of the Iraqis. When the advisers asked if they could bring an Iraqi colleague to eat with them on the American side of the base, they say they were shocked at the response. They were told that the presence of an Iraqi officer in the dining hall might upset the U.S.

'These kids go outside the gate and deal with a very hostile environment. They need a place where they can relax and let their guard down,' says Lt. Kevin Dixon, Col.

Pasquarette's deputy commander. He says the policy was driven by the. The advisers felt differently. 'We really believe there is a,' says Master Sgt. John McFarlane, a senior enlisted adviser to the Iraqis at Camp Taji.

The policy has since been amended to allow advisers to eat with Iraqi officers on the U.S. Side if they file a letter in advance with the base's security office. One of the Iraqi army's primary jobs in the Taji area is to guard water-purification substations that provide most of Baghdad's drinking water.

Last summer, insurgents blew up one of the substations, cutting off water for two weeks. To ensure that didn't happen again, Iraqi army units were dispatched by the U.S. To guard the sites. Iraqi Soldiers began to take regular sniper fire there. In January, the U.S. Advisers asked Col. Pasquarette for help around one of the substations, to shield the Iraqis from snipers.

Pasquarette asked one of his units to help. Weeks passed, but help never came.

American engineering units were 'too busy' fortifying the U.S. Side of Camp Taji and bases around it, says Maj. Martin Herem, who handled the request.

28, a sniper shot in the back one of the Iraqi Soldiers at the water station. Three weeks later, a sniper killed a second Iraqi Soldier who was on patrol near the water station. Iraqi troops said that both times snipers used the small fruit and vegetable stands lining a nearby road for cover. The Iraqi army couldn't return fire without killing shopkeepers and customers.

When the Iraqi Soldiers ran over to ask people who had been shooting at them, locals said they hadn't seen anything. It's dangerous for locals to be seen helping the U.S. Army or the Iraqi army. The day after the second killing, Col. Saad, an Iraqi colonel in the unit Col. Payne was advising, ordered his men to tell the shopkeepers to empty the vegetable stands. The Iraqi Soldiers then bulldozed the stands.

Saad says he destroyed the kiosks to protect his Soldiers. Pasquarette learned about the incident, he was furious. The Iraqis' actions ran completely counter to his strategy. He had told his Soldiers to focus less on killing insurgents and more on reconstruction programs designed to win support of the people.

'When you go lethal or destroy property there may be a short-term gain, but there is a long-term loss,' he says. He saw the move as a throwback to the Saddam Hussein era when the army was used to quell unrest and inflict mass punishment. Because the Iraqi troops operate in his sector, Col. Pasquarette oversees them. He called Col. Payne into his office and demanded that he tell Col.

Saad to have his Soldiers apologize and pay reparations to the shop owners. Payne passed along the orders. Saad says he refused to follow them. 'Here in Iraq if someone makes a mistake, you punish them,' he says, referring to the shop owners' failure to give Iraqis information about the snipers. 'If you give him money, he will repeat the mistake. And he will consider the person who gave him the gift an idiot.' The next day, Col.

Pasquarette met with Col. Saad's Iraqi superior and told him about the dispute. The Iraqi general fired Col. Later that day, three low-ranking Iraqi Soldiers, accompanied by about a dozen Americans, passed out the reimbursement forms. The Iraqi officers in Col. Saad's brigade felt betrayed.

On March 21, just before midnight, four senior officers stopped by Col. Payne's office and threatened to resign. ' They were furious,' says Col. Two days later, Col. Saad was quietly re-hired.

Payne says he is still angry that neither Col. Pasquarette nor his subordinate commanders talked to Col. Saad to hear his side of the story. ' This is a respect issue. These guys don't respect the Iraqis,' Col. ' Personally I don't think there was anything to discuss,' Col. Pasquarette says.

In the days that followed, the relationship between Col. Payne and Col. Pasquarette grew more tense.

In mid-March -- about the time the Iraqis flattened the vegetable stands -- insurgents attacked an Iraqi army patrol base in Tarmiyah, a city of about 50,000, a short drive from Camp Taji. One Iraqi Soldier from Col. Saad's brigade was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade and another was shot in the head by a sniper. The next day, four of Col. Saad's Soldiers died when their armored personnel carrier hit a roadside bomb. The blast threw the turret of the vehicle about 30 yards and lopped off the head of one of the Iraqi Soldiers inside, U.S. And Iraqi officers say.

Senior Iraqi officials in the Ministry of Defense were convinced Tarmiyah was a hotbed of insurgent activity. Pasquarette says he was told by his commander in Baghdad to clear the city of insurgents. Pasquarette and his team spent several days building a plan before he invited Col. Saad and Col. Saad's commander to the U.S.

Side to explain it. The two Iraqi officers were led through a 208-slide PowerPoint briefing, in which all the slides were written in English. The six areas the Iraqi troops were supposed to occupy were named for New England cities, such as Cranston, Bangor and Concord. The Iraqi officers, who spoke only Arabic, were dumbfounded. 'I could see from their body language that both of them were not following what was going on,' says Maj.

Bill Taylor, Col. Payne's deputy. Once the plan was explained to them through an interpreter, the Iraqis strongly disagreed with it.

Pasquarette planned to surround the city with razor wire and set up checkpoints to search all cars moving in and out of the city. And Iraqi Soldiers would then begin regular foot patrols through the city to gain intelligence on insurgents.

The centerpiece of the plan was $5 million in reconstruction projects. Pasquarette argued that the projects would help the U.S. Win support of the city's powerful mayor, Sheik Sayid Jassem, who had been detained by U.S. Forces in the early days of the occupation for supporting the insurgency.

He also thought the projects would turn the people to the side of the new Iraqi government. The Iraqis favored a harder-nosed approach.

They wanted to conduct house-to-house searches and find a way to put pressure on the mayor, who they insisted was still supporting insurgents. They suggested shutting Tarmiyah's business district down for a week. Once the mayor had been cowed with the stick, they favored dangling the $5 million in reconstruction funds. Pasquarette says the Iraqi approach would have alienated the people in Tarmiyah. He rejected it and stuck to his plan.

Although the operation hasn't netted any insurgents, he says people are out shopping and businesses that had been closed are bustling as a result of the checkpoints and foot patrols. Military is bankrolling a pipeline that will bring potable water into the city, building medical clinics and repairing the main road. Attacks in the city are down substantially since March, though they have begun to climb of late, Col.

Pasquarette says. Still, he says the operation was a success because residents feel safer. He doubts the city was ever really a major insurgent hotbed. 'We were all wrong about Tarmiyah,' he says. Saad and Col.

Payne say the insurgents have simply moved outside the city's gates. George Casey, the top military officer in Iraq, acknowledges it has often been hard for U.S. Commanders to let Iraqis take over the fight. 'We are so mission-oriented and so focused, we tend to want to do everything ourselves,' he says. 'It is a constant battle.. I would hope that when the Iraqis have ideas we try to help them execute them.'

Iraqi troops 'have never betrayed their U.S. Advisory teams,' adds Lt. Martin Dempsey, who is overseeing the effort to train and equip Iraqi forces. In their four months together, Col.

Payne and Col. Saad became close. Payne teased him about a poster on his office wall of two fluffy white kittens, nuzzling next to a dozen roses. 'What in the world is the deal with the cat and the flowers?' 'It reminds me of softness and women,' Col. Saad replied.

He often referred to Col. Payne as 'my brother.'

Saad confided his worries about his country and his army to Col. His unit was constantly short of supplies. His Soldiers often didn't have enough fuel for their armored vehicles and generators.

They also to run the the Americans had given them. He blamed corruption in the Iraqi system for supply shortages.

'If you don't have the basics to survive, you cannot be great. You cannot win,' he said one evening. Payne threw his arm around the Iraqi colonel's shoulder. 'No, but you can survive,' he said. Says it is helping the Iraqis fix problems that have led to shortages of equipment. The Iraqi government recently replaced the contractor responsible for serving troops spoiled food. Supplying the army is the responsibility of the Iraqi government and 'there have been a few cases of poor performance' among Iraqi contractors, says Lt.

Michael Negard, a senior spokesman in Iraq. 'While the problems aren't huge, the issue's certainly of the highest priority,' he says. Saad has also grown frustrated with the Americans on the other side of Camp Taji.

Last month, Col. Pasquarette asked the Iraqis to provide a couple of dozen Soldiers to man some checkpoints with U.S. Soldiers showed up at the checkpoints for about a week.

Then, without warning, they left the Iraqis to run them on their own, Col. The Iraqis, who questioned the value of the checkpoints in the first place, were angry they had suddenly been abandoned.

'Why did they leave? Aren't they supposed to be helping us?' Saad asked Col. 'I don't know what the hell they are doing,' Col. Payne replied. Pasquarette says the Iraqis should have been informed that the U.S.

Soldiers were pulling out of those checkpoints. In late May, Col. Payne began to push the Iraqi Soldiers to get out on the offensive.

'I am sick of sitting around and waiting to get attacked,' Col. Payne told Col. He asked Col. Saad to cut loose 10 or 15 Soldiers that he could pair up with three or four U.S. Soldiers to venture out at night in search of the enemy. On May 19, Soldiers from Col. Payne's and Col.

Saad's units set out on their second night patrol. After they stopped a car that was out in violation of curfew, the enemy opened fire on them from a surrounding palm grove. The Soldiers fired back, killing three insurgents and dispersing the rest. When the shooting ended, a man stumbled out of a small shack deep in the palm grove. His hands were tied and a blindfold hung around his neck. 'Come mister. I am problem,' he sobbed in broken English.

The man said he worked as a legal adviser for Iraq's Ministry of Defense and had been kidnapped by men who told him they would slaughter him 'like a sheep.' The kidnappers were setting up a camera to film his execution, he said, when they heard the Soldiers and left him. 'God sent you to save me,' the man said, as tears streamed down his face. Payne was elated.

'The Iraqi army saved a life. It also demonstrated that it will go into the field to find and destroy the enemy,' he said. His victory, however, quickly gave way to crushing defeat. The next day, he was summoned to meet with his immediate supervisor. Payne was relieved of his command and told to move to a headquarters position in Baghdad. He says he was told that he removed because he was 'ineffective' and 'lacked the skills necessary to lead [his] team in this challenging environment.'

An Army spokesman in Baghdad said Col. Payne wasn't relieved for any single incident. He declined to comment further. A few days before Col.

Payne was fired, Col. Pasquarette said in an interview that he thought Col. Payne and his men had grown too close to the Iraqis they were advising and his. 'From my perspective, the move was warranted,' Col. Pasquarette wrote in an email after Col.

Payne was dismissed. The morning after he was fired, Col. Payne spent the day saying goodbye to Col. Saad and the U.S.

Soldiers on his team. That evening, he boarded a helicopter for Camp Victory, a massive U.S. Base on the outskirts of Baghdad. 'I'm now here in Victory -- an alien environment to me and one I never wanted to be a part of,' he wrote in an email. He was able to hold his emotions in check until his helicopter lifted off from Camp Taji. Then, he says, he began to sob.

'I simply cannot tell you how much I will miss my team.' Iraq is yet again, a WW2 re-enactment U.S. Military with even LESS ground maneuver tendencies and MORE aircraft delivered firepower lust than it had in Vietnam, and ZERO airborne forward air controllers in fixed-wing observation planes!

DoD in love with Rumsfeld/MacNamara-style RMA bombardment doesn't realize air striking buildings full of civilians makes more rebels. In the following Tribune article a couple marine officers point this out, but be advised outsider disciple marines Hammes and Wilson do not represent the USMC HQMC corporate or rank & file mentality. Hammes also doesn't understand that even if you are using restraint you can't be driving around in wheeled trucks and must be in multiple armor layered tracks lest you get blown up and go bezerk like the Haditha marines did.

You can't have a 'glass jaw' and 'turn the other cheek'. We have contacted Wilson and he may understand that you ain't gaining any populace confidence if you cannot even protect yourself because you are in a wheeled truck. However, the whole problem with the Boydian 4GWs is they have an anti-equipment knee-jerk outlook. Their mental narcissism uses grease pencils and books while the RMA firepower mental narcissism uses laptops and electronic gadgets.

What's the essential difference? The former are right that the loyalty of the people are key but then blow it running with stupid egomaniac marines in wheeled trucks and on foot who lack the maturity and humility to pull off a T.E.

Narcissism is not AOK and the 'maneuver warfare' camp that needs the token USMC approval of their views to somehow feel their lives were not wasted have swallowed the cancer of pride that undermines everything. Chicago Tribune June 17, 2006 Pg. 1 Analysis Experts: U.S. Using Wrong Tactics Fighting in Iraq likely to stay at same level By Stephen J. Hedges, Washington Bureau WASHINGTON -- Despite the recent killing of insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, some former military officials and experts worry that the U.S. Has not learned the lessons of counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq and that, as a result, a significant improvement in the fighting may not be around the corner.

In confronting a frustratingly resilient insurgency, the U.S. Is relying heavily on precision bombing, which destroys buildings and can kill civilians, generating ill will. Tactics used in house clearings have led to incidents such as an alleged massacre by marines in the town of Haditha. Large incursions into the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi have bred dissatisfaction among ordinary Iraqis, violating a cardinal principle of counterinsurgency. Pentagon leaders repeatedly have vowed to improve their counterinsurgency training, but only last year did the Army begin a revision of its tactics, and a new manual on the topic has not been warmly received. Commanders in Iraq also have opened a counterinsurgency school in Iraq in an attempt to better confront the enemy.

But many specialists in this type of fighting, including recently retired military officers, worry that key lessons have not been learned three years into the war. Even as the military targets al-Zarqawi's apparent successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, they say killings of insurgent leaders will have a limited effect.

'It's about the will of the American people and the trust of the Iraqi people, and situations like Haditha attack both,' said T.X. Hammes, a retired marine colonel and Iraq veteran whose book on counterinsurgent warfare, 'The Sling and the Stone,' is considered a 'must-read' among younger officers in Iraq.

'Fighting insurgents is about not making any more enemies.' Despite his recent high-profile Camp David, Md., summit with his war Cabinet and select outside experts, there is little evidence that President Bush has made any changes to his strategy for Iraq. Bush holds his ground Indeed, during his surprise visit to Iraq on Tuesday and in a news conference upon returning to Washington on Wednesday, Bush repeated what he has said often about the U.S.

Military presence there. 'The policy of the United States government is to stand with this new government and help them succeed, and we will do what it takes to help them succeed,' the president said. [EDITOR: except changing our bombard from the air mentality from comfy bases] The good news of the killing of al-Zarqawi all but eclipsed a run of negative developments in Iraq for the U.S. In mid-May the Pentagon acknowledged that it was investigating allegations that marines might have shot 24 Iraqi citizens in Haditha in revenge for the roadside bomb attack that killed a marine..

The Haditha allegations prompted allegations of other alleged civilian shootings by U.S. The military dismissed one as previously investigated, but eight marines have been detained at Camp Pendleton, Calif., pending possible charges in a second case.

Though al-Zarqawi's demise has shifted the spotlight off Haditha, the shootings there could represent a dividing line in U.S. Military operations in Iraq.

Civilian deaths violate a primary rule of counterinsurgency doctrine, which emphasizes non-violent, community police actions that enhance personal security instead of endangering it. The Haditha incident, still under Pentagon review, isn't the only suggestion that the U.S. Counterinsurgency campaign is off track.

Al-Zarqawi's bombing death aside, U.S. Forces in Iraq have made frequent use of precision bombing as a means of targeting insurgents. That tactic, while sometimes effective, can also lead to extensive civilian deaths and property damage.

A `losing' tactic The increased use of, said G.I. Wilson, a retired marine colonel who recently finished a second tour in Iraq and who writes frequently on fighting insurgents, 'means that you're losing. A 500-pound bomb causes a lot of destruction.' One of the allegations of wrongful civilian deaths leveled at the military recently involved the destruction of an Iraqi home by a. Military said it investigated a nighttime raid on the village of Ishaqi, about 55 miles north of Baghdad, and found that U.S. Troops used proper force. An Iraqi human-rights group alleged that 11 civilians were wrongfully killed in Ishaqi, and citizens there alleged that a building was destroyed by the C-130 to conceal dead residents.

The same troubles have vexed U.S. Troops in Afghanistan, where the Taliban enemy is more remote. Last month, the Afghan government complained that a U.S. Bomb struck a village where Taliban suspects had taken refuge. Sixteen civilians died in that air strike, the government said. An estimated 20 Taliban fighters were also killed in the strike.

Bush said in December that about 30,000 Iraqi citizens had died 'as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence.' Although some of those deaths can be attributed to al-Zarqawi's campaign of car bombing and suicide attacks, Iraqi civilian deaths have continued in a spate of car bombings and shootings since al-Zarqawi's death. The reasons for the missteps by U.S. Troops can be traced to an. Force in Iraq was slow to recognize the emergence of the Iraqi insurgency in 2003 and it has been reluctant to adopt counterinsurgency tactics. Commanders trained in heavy artillery assaults bristled at the notion of exposing troops on street patrols, interacting with Iraqi citizens and gathering intelligence on likely insurgents.

George Casey, the U.S. Commander in Iraq, developed a counterinsurgency school there because, as one subordinate told The Washington Post, the task was not getting done during predeployment training in the U.S. In addition, Lt. Pete Chiarelli, commanding general of the multinational force in Iraq, is credited by many with putting a heavier emphasis on counterinsurgent tactics. Hint of drawdown The strain on U.S.

Troops during three years of war and the possible political necessity of reducing the U.S. Presence in Iraq before the November congressional elections may play a part in any decision to cut the number of troops. Carter Ham, deputy director for regional operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested last week that the force might be gradually be drawn down as the end of normal seven-month and yearlong rotations are completed. 'The overall strategy, it's important to remember, is not driven by numbers but by effect,' Ham said. 'And as the Iraqis are able to exercise greater responsibility and independence, then over time we would certainly like to see the U.S.

Number come down.' 'We Got the Guns' = immature American marines wrong for SASOs, Part 1 The following is even more conclusive evidence that during the phase,, otherwise they will inter-mingle with the civil populace and start a rebellion against us if we stick around. Once inter-mingled, if we try to do dragnets, we end up creating new rebels by our kill/capture door kicking and incarcerations for every previously existing rebel found. Studying Trainor/Gordon's book, 'Cobra II' it appears CENTCOM's war plan did NOT have and 3D maneuver blocking forces to kill/capture Saddam and his sons leaving Baghdad. CENTCOM absurdly expected a slow, obvious 2D maneuver 'armored stampede' from the Army's 3 rd Infantry Division and a constantly-pinned-down-by-Iraqi-rear-guards, USMC clusterfuck in 75% wheeled trucks to encircle from the west and east Baghdad would trap them when they had several days to pack all their belongings and be long gone. This is not how.

The planned Cobra II and the light narcissists did Operation Just Cause. This is also yet more proof that the with zero humility, zero cultural training, has his weapons locked up 24/7/365 as he's victimized in a 'From Here to Eternity' garrison routine is the wrong type of person to send overseas for SASO operations who suddenly has power in his hands and a chip-on-his-shoulder. Www.truthdig.com/dig/item/20060627_occupation_iraq_hearts_minds The Occupation of Iraqi Hearts and Minds A Dig led by Nir Rosen Editor's note: Truthdig contributor Nir Rosen, an American reporter who has lived for the last three years in Iraq and who can pass as Middle Eastern, describes what it's like to live under the boot of a culturally callous-and sometimes criminal-occupying force in Iraq. 'The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media.' Three years into an occupation of Iraq replete with so-called milestones, turning points and individual events hailed as 'sea changes' that would 'break-the-back' of the insurgency, a different type of incident received an intense, if ephemeral, amount of attention.

A local human rights worker and aspiring journalist in the western Iraqi town of Haditha filmed the aftermath of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians. The video made its way to an Iraqi working for Time magazine, and the story was finally publicized months later. The Haditha massacre was compared to the Vietnam War's My Lai massacre, and like the well-publicized and embarrassing Abu Ghraib scandal two years earlier, the attention it received made it seem as if it were a horrible aberration perpetrated by 'a few bad apples' who might have overreacted to the stress they endured as occupiers. In reality both Abu Ghraib and Haditha were merely more extreme versions of the day-to-day workings of the American occupation in Iraq, and what makes them unique is not so much how bad they were, or how embarrassing, but the fact that they made their way to the media and were publicized despite attempts to cover them up. Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the occupation.

The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media. Americans, led to believe that their Soldiers and marines would be welcomed as 'liberators' by the Iraqi people, have no idea what the occupation is really like from the perspective of Iraqis who endure it. Although I am American, born and raised in New York City, I came closer to experiencing what it might feel like to be Iraqi than many of my colleagues. I often say that the secret to my success in Iraq as a journalist is my melanin advantage. I inherited my Iranian father's Middle Eastern features, which allowed me to go unnoticed in Iraq, blend into crowds, march in demonstrations, sit in mosques, walk through Falluja's worst neighborhoods.

I also benefited from being able to speak Arabic-in particular its Iraqi dialect, which I hastily learned in Baghdad upon my arrival and continued to develop throughout my time in Iraq. My skin color and language skills allowed me to relate to the American occupier in a different way, for he looked at me as if I were just another 'haji', the 'gook' of the war in Iraq. I first realized my advantage in April 2003, when I was sitting with a group of American Soldiers and another Soldier walked up and wondered what this haji (me) had done to get arrested by them. Later that summer, I walked in the direction of an American tank and heard one Soldier say about me, 'That's the biggest fuckin' Iraqi (pronounced eye-raki) I ever saw.' A Soldier by the gun said, 'I don't care how big he is, if.'

I was lucky enough to have an American passport in my pocket, which I promptly took out and waved, shouting: 'Don't shoot! I'm an American!' It was my first encounter with hostile American checkpoints but hardly my last, and I grew to fear the unpredictable American military, which could kill me for looking like an Iraqi male of fighting age. Countless Iraqis were not lucky enough to speak American English or carry a U.S. Passport, and. In 2004 the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that by September 2004,. Although this figure was challenged by many, especially partisans of the war, it seems perfectly plausible to me based on what I have seen in Iraq, having spent most of the postwar period there.

What I never understood was why more journalists did not focus on this, choosing instead to look for the 'good news' and go along with the 'official' story. My first direct encounter with American marines was from the Iraqi side. In late April 2003, I was attending the Friday prayers in a Sunni bastion in Baghdad. Thousands of people were praying and the devout flooded out of the mosque and laid their prayer rugs on the street and the square in front of it. A marine patrol rounded a corner and walked right into hundreds of people praying on the street and listening to the sermon, even approaching the separate section for women. Dozens of men rose and put their shoes on, forming a virtual wall to block the armed marines, who seemed unaware of the danger. The marines did not understand Arabic.

The demonstrators screamed, and some waved their fists, shouting 'America is the enemy of God!' As they were restrained by a few cooler-headed men from within their ranks. I ran to advise the marines that Friday prayers was not a good time to show up fully armed. The men sensed this and asked me to tell their lieutenant, who appeared oblivious to the public relations catastrophe he might be provoking. He told me: 'That's why we've got the guns.' Even if the Girl Scouts had occupied Iraq they would have resorted to these methods.

[EDITOR: disagree; ] A nervous Soldier asked me to go explain the situation to the bespectacled staff sergeant, who had been attempting to calm the situation by telling the demonstrators, who did not speak English, that the U.S. Patrol meant no harm. He finally lost his temper when an Iraqi told him gently, 'You must go.' 'I have the weapons,' the sergeant said.

'You back off.' 'Let's get the fuck out!' One marine shouted to another as the tension increased.

I was certain that a shove, a tossed stone or a shot fired could have provoked a massacre and turned the city violently against the American occupation. Finally the marines retreated cautiously around a corner as the worshipers were held back by their own comrades.

It could have ended worse, and a week later it did when 17 demonstrators were killed by American Soldiers in Falluja, and several more were killed in a subsequent demonstration, a massacre that contributed to the city's support of the resistance. I believe that any journalist who spent even a brief period embedded with American Soldiers must have witnessed crimes being committed against innocent Iraqis, so I have always been baffled by how few were reported and how skeptically the Western media treated Arabic reports of such crimes.

These crimes were not committed because Americans are bad or malicious; they were intrinsic to the occupation, and even if the Girl Scouts had occupied Iraq they would have resorted to these methods. In the end, it is those who dispatched decent young American men and women to commit crimes who should be held accountable. [EDITOR: you mean the palace generals who sent them out to tidy the area via presence patrols?] (Page 2) I still feel guilt over my complicity in crimes the one time I was embedded, in the fall of 2003.

(I spent two weeks with the 3 rd Armored Cavalry Regiment stationed in Husaybah, an Iraqi town near the Syrian border that is a suspected entry point for 'foreign insurgent fighters'.) Normally, I like to think, if I witnessed an act of bullying of the weak or the elderly, or the terrorizing of children, I would interfere and try to stop it. After all, a passion for justice is what propelled me into this career. It started when I arrived in the main base in the desert.

Local Iraqi laborers were sitting in the sun waiting to be acknowledged by the American Soldiers. Every so often a representative would come to the Soldiers to explain in Arabic that they were waiting for their American overseer. The Soldier would shout back in English. Finally I translated between them. One Soldier, upset with an Iraqi man for looking at him, asked him: 'Do I owe you money?

So why the fuck are you looking at me?' After a week, the Army unit I was living with went on a raid targeting alleged Al Qaeda cells. Included were safe houses, financiers and fighters as well as alleged resistance leaders such as senior military officers from elite units of the former Iraqi army.

All together there were 62 names on the wanted list. A minimum of 29 locations would be raided, taking out the 'nervous system' of the area resistance 'and the guys who actually do the shooting.' The raids began at night. The men descended upon villages by the border with Syria in the western desert. After half an hour of bumpy navigating in the dark the convoy approached the first house and the vehicles switched their lights on, illuminating the target area as a tank broke the stone wall. Cheered one sergeant, 'Hi honey I'm home!' The teams charged over the rubble from the wall, breaking through the door with a sledgehammer and dragging several men out.

The barefoot prisoners, dazed from their slumber, were forcefully marched over rocks and hard ground. One short middle-aged man, clearly injured and limping with painful difficulty, was violently pushed forward in the grip of a Brobdingnagian Soldier who said, 'You'll fucking learn how to walk.' Each male was asked his name.

None matched the names on the list. A prisoner was asked where the targeted military officer lived. 'Down the road,' he pointed. He was ordered, and he was shoved ahead, stumbling over the rocky street, terrified that he would be seen as an informer in the neighborhood, terrified that he too would be taken away. He stopped at the house but the Soldiers ran ahead.

'No, no, it's here,' yelled a sergeant, and they ran back, breaking through the gate and bursting into the house. It was a large villa, with grape vines covering the driveway. Women and children from within were ordered to sit in the garden. The men were pushed to the ground on the driveway and asked their names. One was indeed the first high-value target. His son begged the Soldiers, 'Take me for 10 years but leave my father!'

Both were taken. The children screamed 'Daddy, Daddy!' As the men were led out and the women were given leaflets in Arabic explaining that the men had been arrested.

As the main element departed, the psychological operations vehicle blasted AC/DC rock music through neighborhood streets. Home after home, met the same fate. Some homes had only women; these houses too were ransacked, closets broken, mattresses overturned, clothes thrown out of drawers. Men were dragged on the ground by their legs to be handcuffed outside.

One bony ancient sheik walked out with docility and was pushed forcefully to the ground, where he was wrestled by Soldiers who had trouble cuffing his arms. A commando grabbed him from them, and tightly squeezed the old man's arms together, lifting him in the air and throwing him down on the ground, nearly breaking his fragile arms. As her husband was taken away, one woman angrily asked Allah to curse the Soldiers, calling them 'Dogs!

Over and over. When his Soldiers left a home, one officer emerged to slap them on the back like a coach congratulating his players during halftime in a winning game. In a big compound of several houses the Soldiers took all the men, even the ones not on the list.

A sergeant explained that the others would be held for questioning to see whether they had any useful information. The men cried out that they had children still inside. In several houses Soldiers tenderly carried out babies who had been left sleeping in their cribs and handed them to the women.

When the work at a house was complete, or at the Home Run stage (stages were divided into 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Home Run and Grand Slam, meaning ready to move on), the Soldiers relaxed and joked, breaking their own tension and ignoring the trembling and shocked women and children crouched together on the lawns behind them. Prisoners with duct tape on their eyes and their hands cuffed behind them with plastic 'zip ties' sat in the back of the truck for hours, without water. They moved their heads toward sounds, disoriented and frightened, trying to understand what was happening around them. Any time a prisoner moved or twitched, a Soldier bellowed at him angrily and cursed. Thrown among the tightly crowded men in one truck was a boy no more than 15 years old, his eyes wide in terror as the duct tape was placed on them. By daylight the whole town could see a large truck full of prisoners. Two men walking to work with their breakfast in a basket were stopped at gunpoint, ordered to the ground, cuffed and told to 'Shut the fuck up' as their basket's contents were tossed out and they were questioned about the location of a suspect.

The Soldier guarding them spoke of the importance of intimidating Iraqis and instilling fear in them. 'If they got something to tell us I'd rather they be scared,' he explained. An Iraqi policeman drove by in a white SUV clearly marked 'Police.'

He too was stopped at gunpoint and ordered not to move or talk until the last raid was complete. From the list of 34 names, the troop I was with brought in about 16 positively identified men, along with 54 men who were neighbors, relatives or just happened to be around.

By 08:30 the Americans were done and started driving back to base. As the main element departed, the psychological operations vehicle blasted AC/DC rock music through neighborhood streets. 'It's good for morale after such a long mission,' a captain said. Crowds of children clustered on porches smiling, waving and giving the passing Soldiers little thumbs up. A sergeant waved back. Neighbors awakened by the noise huddled outside and watched the convoy. One little girl stood before her father and guarded him from the Soldiers with her arms outstretched and legs wide.

(Page 3) In Baghdad, coalition officials announced that '112 suspects' had been arrested in a major raid near the Syrian border, including a high-ranking official in the former Republican Guard. 'The general officer that they captured, Abed Hamed Mowhoush al-Mahalowi, was reported to have links with Saddam Hussein and was a financier of anti-coalition activities, according to intelligence sources,' a military spokeswoman said. 'Troops from the 1 st and 4th squadrons of the Third Armored Cavalry cordoned off sections of the town and searched 29 houses to find 'subversive elements,' including 12 of the 13 suspects they had targeted for capture,' she said. That night the prisoners were visible on a large dirt field in a square of concertina wire. Beneath immense spotlights and near loud generators, they slept on the ground, guarded by Soldiers. One sergeant was surprised by the high number of prisoners taken by the troop I was with.

'Did they just arrest every man they found?' He asked, wondering if ' we just made another 300 people hate us.'

The following day 57 prisoners were transported to a larger base for 'further interrogation'. Some were not the suspects, just relatives of the suspects or men suspected of being the suspects. The next night the troop departed the base at 0200, hoping to find those alleged Al Qaeda suspects who had not been home during the previous operation. Soldiers descended upon homes in a large compound, their boots trampling over mattresses in rooms the inhabitants did not enter with shoes on. Most of the wanted men were nowhere to be found, their women and children prevaricating about their locations. Some of their relatives were arrested instead.

'That woman is annoying!' One young Soldier complained about a mother's desperate ululations as her son was taken from his house. 'How do you think your mother would sound if they were taking you away?' A sergeant asked him. Three days after the operation, a dozen prisoners could be seen marching in a circle outside their detention cells, surrounded by barbed wire. They were shouting 'USA, USA!'

Over and over. 'They were talkin' when we told 'em not to, so we made 'em talk somethin' we liked to hear,' one of the Soldiers guarding them said with a grin. Another gestured up with his hands, letting them know they had to raise their voices. A first sergeant quipped that the ones who were not guilty 'will be guilty next time,' after such treatment. Even if the men were guilty, no proof would be provided to the community. There would be no process of transparent justice. The only thing evident to the Iraqi public would be the American guilt.

In November 2003 a major from the judge advocate general's office working on establishing an Iraqi judicial process told me that there were at least 7,000 Iraqis detained by American forces. Many languished in prisons indefinitely, lost in a system that imposed the English language on Arabic speakers with Arabic names not easily transcribed. Some were termed 'security detainees' and held for six months pending a review to determine whether they were still a 'security risk.' Most were innocent. Many were arrested simply because a neighbor did not like them. A lieutenant colonel familiar with the process told me that there is no judicial process for the thousands of detainees. If the military were to try them, there would be a court-martial, which would imply that the U.S.

Was occupying Iraq, and lawyers working for the administration are still debating whether it is an 'occupation' or 'liberation'. Two years later, 50,000 Iraqis had been imprisoned by the Americans and only 2% had ever been found guilty of anything.

The S2 (intelligence) section in the Army unit I was with had not proved itself very reliable in the past-a fact that frustrated Soldiers to no end. 'You get all psyched up to do a hard mission,' said one sergeant, 'and it turns out to be three little girls. The little kids get to me, especially when they cry.' The reason for the lack of confidence in S2 was made clear by the case of a man called Ayoub.

I accompanied the troop when it raided Ayoub's home based on intelligence S2 provided: intercepted phone calls, in which Ayoub spoke of proceeding to the next level and obtaining land mines and other weapons. On the day of the raid, tanks, Bradleys and Humvees squeezed between the neighborhood walls. A CIA operator angrily eyed the rooftops and windows of nearby houses, a silencer on his assault weapon. Soldiers broke through Ayoub's door early in the morning and when he did not immediately respond to their orders he was shot with nonlethal ordinance, little pellets exploding like gunshot from the weapons grenade launcher. The floor of the house was covered in his blood.

He was dragged into a room and interrogated forcefully as his family was pushed back against a garden fence. Ayoub's frail mother, covered in a shawl, with traditional tribal tattoos marking her face, pleaded with an immense Soldier to spare her son's life, protesting his innocence. She took the Soldier's hand and kissed it repeatedly while on her knees. He pushed her to the grass along with Ayoub's four girls and two boys, all small, and his wife. They squatted barefoot, screaming, their eyes wide in terror, clutching each other as Soldiers emerged with bags full of documents, photo albums and two CDs with Saddam and his cronies on the cover. These CDs, called ' The Crimes of Saddam,' are common on every Iraqi street, and as their title suggests, they were not made by Saddam supporters; however, the Soldiers saw only the picture of Saddam and assumed they were proof of guilt.

Ayoub was brought out and pushed onto the truck. He gestured to his shrieking relatives to remain where they were. He was an avuncular man, small and round-balding and unshaven with a hooked nose and slightly pockmarked face. He could not have looked more innocent.

He sat frozen, staring numbly ahead as the Soldiers ignored him, occasionally glancing down at their prisoner with sneering disdain. The medic looked at Ayoub's injured hand and chuckled to his friends, 'It ain't my hand.'

The truck blasted country music on the way back to the base. Ayoub was thrown in the detainment center. After the operation there were smiles of relief among the Soldiers, slaps on the back and thumbs up. (Page 4) Several hours later, a call was intercepted from the Ayoub whom the Americans were seeking. 'Oh shit,' said the S2 captain, '[we've got] the wrong Ayoub.' The innocent father of six who was in custody actually was a worker in a phosphate plant the Americans were running.

But he was not let go. If he was released, there would be a risk that the other Ayoub would learn he was being sought. The night after his arrest a relieved Ayoub could be seen escorted by Soldiers to call his family and report he was fine but would not be home for a few days.

'It was not the wrong guy,' the troop's captain said defensively, shifting blame elsewhere. 'We raided the house we were supposed and arrested the man we were told to.' When the Soldiers who had captured Ayoub learned of the mistake, they were not surprised. 'Oops,' said one.

Another one wondered, 'What do you tell a guy like that, sorry?' 'It's depressing,' a third said. 'We trashed the wrong guy's house and the guy that's been shooting at us is out there with his house not trashed.' The Soldier who shot the nonlethal ordinance at Ayoub said, 'I'm just glad he didn't do something that made me shoot him [with a bullet].' Then the Soldiers resumed their banter. A few days later, the Army did a further analysis of the phone calls that had originally sent them in search of a man named Ayoub. In the calls, Ayoub had indeed spoken of proceeding to the next level and obtaining land mines and other weapons.

This had rightfully alarmed the Army's intelligence officers. But at some point an analyst realized that Ayoub was not a terrorist intent on obtaining weapons; he turned out to be a kid playing video games and talking about them with his friend on the phone. The Procrustean application of spurious information gathered by intelligence officers who cannot speak Arabic and are not familiar with Iraqi, Arab or Muslim culture is creating enemies instead of eliminating them.

The Procrustean application of spurious information gathered by intelligence officers who cannot speak Arabic and are not familiar with Iraqi, Arab or Muslim culture is creating enemies instead of eliminating them. The S2 captain could barely hide his disdain for Iraqis.

' Oh he just hates anything Iraqi,' another captain said of him, adding that the intelligence officers do not venture off the base or interact with Iraqis or develop any relations with the people they are expected to understand. A lieutenant colonel from the Army's civil affairs command explained that these officers do not read about the Soldiers engaging with Iraqis, sharing cigarettes, tea, meals and conversations.

They read only the reports of 'incidents' and they view Iraqis solely as security threat. The intelligence officers in Iraq do not know Iraq. In every market in Iraq hundreds of wooden crates can be found piled one atop the other. Sold for storage, upon further examination these crates reveal themselves to be former ammunition crates. For the past 25 years Iraq has been importing weapons to feed its army's appetite for war against Iran, the Kurds, Kuwait and America. When empty, the crates were sold for domestic use. The Soldiers with the Army unit I was with assumed the crates they found in nearly every home implicated the owners in terrorist activities, rather than the much simpler truth.

During the operation described here I saw one of the Soldiers find such a crate overturned above a small hole in a man's backyard. 'He was trying to bury it when he saw us coming,' one Soldier deduced confidently. He did not lift the crate to discover that it was protecting irrigation pipes and hoses in a pit.

Saddam bestowed his largesse upon the security services that served as his praetorian guard and executioners. Elite fighters received Jawa motorcycles. Immediately after the war, Jawa motorcycles were available in every market in Iraq that sold scooters and motorcycles. Some had been stolen from government buildings in the frenzy of looting that followed the war and was directed primarily against institutions of the former government.

Soldiers of the Army unit I accompanied were always alert for Jawa motorcycles, and indeed it was true that many Iraqi paramilitaries had used them against the Americans. On a night the troop had received RPG fire, its members drove back to base through the town. When they spotted a man on a Jawa motorcycle they fired warning shots. When he did not stop they shot him to death. 'He was up to no good,' the captain explained. 26, 2003, after two weeks of brutal daily interrogations by military intelligence officers, Special Forces Soldiers and CIA personnel, Maj.

Abed Hamed Mowhoush, the former chief of Iraqi air defenses whose arrest I had witnessed, died in a U.S. Detention facility. Twenty-four to 48 hours before that, he had been interrogated and beaten by CIA personnel. The Army's Criminal Investigation Division began looking into Mowhoush's death that same day.

The next day an Army news release stated that he had died of natural causes. 'Mowhoush said he didn't feel well and subsequently lost consciousness,' according to the statement, '.

The Soldier questioning him found no pulse and called for medical authorities. A surgeon responded within five minutes to continue advanced cardiac life support techniques, but they were ineffective.' 2, 2003, an Army medical examiner's autopsy said the general's death was 'a homicide by asphyxia,' but it was not until May 12, 2004, that the death certificate was issued, with homicide as the cause. The Pentagon autopsy report in May said he had died of 'asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression' and that there was 'evidence of blunt force trauma to the chest and legs.' Mowhoush was one of several Iraqis whose death certificates were not issued until May of 2004, long after their deaths. EDITOR: There are hand-held devices that can send out phrases in the Iraqi language.notice these clowns don't have them. A NLB-SC OR SNC-C would have these devices and have mature psychologically screened to not be narcissistic egomaniacs, Soldiers who know the language and culture who could intermingle with the civil populace and do surveillance ops to kill/capture as threats appear while doing their primary function of restoring social order.

(Page 5) American Soldiers had no [EDITOR: nation-state war] mission and viewed Iraqis as 'the enemy' through a prism of 'us and them.' An officer returning from a fact-finding mission complained of 'a lot of damn good individuals who received no guidance, training or plan and who are operating in a vacuum.' Inside the G2, or intelligence, section of the Army's civil affairs headquarters in Baghdad, on a bulletin board I saw an anecdote meant to be didactic. It told of American Soldiers suppressing Muslim Filipino insurgents a century before.

They dipped bullets in pig's blood and shot some Muslim rebels, to send a warning to the others. A Latino civil affairs officer, fed up with Iraqis, explained that the only solution was to shut down Baghdad entirely. Military civil affairs officers are supposed to provide civil administration in the absence of local power structures, minimize friction between the military and civilians, restore normalcy and empower local institutions.

One brigade commander explained to a civil affairs major that 'I am not here to win hearts and minds, I am here to kill the enemy.' He failed to provide his civil affairs team with security, so it could not operate. One morning in Albu Hishma, a village north of Baghdad cordoned off with barbed wire, the local U.S. Commander decided to bulldoze any house that had pro-Saddam graffiti on it, and gave half a dozen families a few minutes to remove whatever they cared about the most before their homes were flattened.

In Baquba, two 13-year-old girls were killed by a Bradley armored personnel carrier. They were digging through trash and the American rule was that anybody digging on road sides would be shot. The 4th Infantry Division was especially notorious in Iraq. Its Soldiers in Samara handcuffed two suspects and threw them off a bridge into a river.

One of them died. In Basra, seven Iraqi prisoners were beaten to death by British Soldiers. A high-ranking Iraqi police official in Basra identified one of the victims as his son. It is common practice for soldiers to arrest the wives and children of suspects as 'material witnesses' when the suspects are not captured in raids. In some cases the Soldiers leave notes for the suspects, letting them know their families will be released should they turn themselves in. Soldiers claim this is a very effective tactic.

Soldiers on [EDITOR: vulnerable, wheeled] military vehicles routinely shoot at Iraqi cars that approach too fast or come too close, and at Iraqis wandering in fields. 'They were up to no good,' they explain.

Every commander is a law unto himself. He is advised by a judge advocate general who interprets the rules as he wants. A war crime to one is legitimate practice to another. After the Center for Army Lessons Learned sent a team of personnel to Israel to study that country's counterinsurgency tactics, the Army implemented the lessons it learned, and initiated house demolitions in Samara and Tikrit, blowing up homes of suspected insurgents. It is hard to relax when the Soldier in the Humvee in front of you aims his machine gun at you.

It is hard to be patient when mosques are raided, when protesters are shot, when innocent families are gunned down at checkpoints or by frightened Soldiers in vehicles. It is hard to be patient in hours of izdiham, or traffic jams, that are blamed on Americans closing off main roads throughout Baghdad. The Americans close roads after 'incidents' or when they are looking for planted bombs.

[EDITOR: too late, CONOPS should be to PICKET the MSRs so they CAN'T HAVE LAND MINES EMPLACED] Their vehicles block the roads and they answer no questions, refusing to let any Iraqi approach. Cars are forced to drive 'wrong side,' as Iraqis call it, with near fatal results. Iraqis have become experts in walking over the concertina wire that divides so much of their cities: First one foot presses the razor wire down, then the other steps over. They are experts in driving slowly through lakes and rivers of sewage.

They are experts in sifting through mountains of garbage for anything that can be reused. It is hard to relax when the Soldier in the Humvee or armored personnel carrier in front of you aims his machine gun at you; when aggressive white men race by, running you off the road as they scowl behind their wraparound sunglasses; when Soldiers shoot at any car that comes too close. [EDITOR: I'd ban U.S. Troops wearing arrogant dark tint sunglasses in Iraq] Iraqis in their own country are reminded at all times who has control over their lives, who can take them with impunity.

An old Iraqi woman approached the gate to Baghdad international airport. Draped in a black ebaya, she was carrying a picture of her missing son. She did not speak English, and the Soldier in body armor she asked for help did not speak Arabic. He shouted at her to 'get the fuck away.' She did not understand and continued beseeching him. The Soldier was joined by another. Together they locked and loaded their machine guns, chambering a round, aiming the guns at the old woman and shouting at her that if she did not leave 'we will kill you.'

The explosive-sniffing dog in front of the Sheraton and Palestine hotels is hated by the Iraqi security guards as well as the American Soldiers who stand there because it, like the rest of us who live in the area, is subject to olfactory whims as it imagines every day that it smells a bomb, forcing them to close off the street for several hours. Two of my friends were arrested for not having a bomb last week when the dog decided their bag smelled funny. They were jailed for four days. The American occupation of Iraq has lasted over three years. The above stories are based on my two weeks with one unit in a small part of the country.

Imagine how many Iraqi homes have been destroyed. How many families have been traumatized. How many men have disappeared into American military vehicles in the night. How many crimes have been committed against the Iraqi people every single day in the course of the normal operations of the occupation, when Soldiers were merely doing their duty, when they were not angry or vengeful as in Haditha. Imagine what we have done to the Iraqi people, tortured by Saddam for years, then released from three decades of his bloody rule only to find their hope stolen from them and a new terror unleashed.

Kill/Capture Wannabe Delta Force narcissists in LAV-III trucks jam streets, Part 2 Caveat: this immature narcissist just now coming around to some adult conclusions, is a not a numbered 'Special Forces' group Soldier. He's BSing the reporter on his true social standing he had in the U.S. While the Soldier lied to Rosen that he was a 'Special Forces' Soldier, its clear what he told of his experiences as an infantry narcissist in a Stryker truck are true. It also says a lot about U.S. Army narcissist culture that he had to pad his resume to feel good about himself, more proof that the whole 'pyramid of ego' needs to be shit-canned. He wore the uniform of the United States of America with 'U.S.

Army' on his nametape, if this isn't enough its time we shut down the snobs within the Army who are dividing us into 'us' and 'them' in the militarism ego pyramid. Some of those who have posted there on the TRUTHDIG web page foisting the 'he-didn't-have-an-adequate-penis-to-make-it-into-SF' crap is exactly the 'pyramid of ego' narcissism we have created that has elevated KILL/CAPTURE by SMALL UNITS as the epitome of military self-validation, which is total BULLSHIT. America needs a military that can do other things than small unit commando actions, like large-scale nation-state war and stability operations and its wrong to elevate a small group of egomaniacs doing a small set of missions as the ultimate end state when planet earth is still very large and small groups CANNOT defend human freedom since they cannot offer enough military terrain control. Its also increasingly obvious that SF units cannot do large nation-state 'hearts & minds' stability operations and kill/capture at the same time if they are all committed to the latter.

Details: What's NOT mentioned in the story is that SFOD-D 'Delta Force', the numbered SF groups, Rangers are so busy doing ego gratifying 'kill/capture' in Iraq/Afghanistan that they are not available to do foreign internal defense (FID) to train the Iraqi Army to use all those 'cultural skills' they allegedly have so in this vacuum, the 'young, dumb and full-of-cum' conventional nation-state war Soldiers are training the Iraqis to be cheap imitations of foot and truck-bound easily ambushed, lightfighter narcissists. In fact, our lust to kill/capture a mythical minority of 'bad apples' (truth is OUR POORLY EXECUTED OCCUPATION IS CREATING THE REBELS) is so across-the-board in Iraq, we don't have enough 'special' troops to do it so VOILA! The wannabe Delta Force Soldier in a Stryker truck gets to knock down some doors after 'stacking' by the door and going into the 'fatal funnel'. He finally got to wear that drop leg holster afterall! Take some digital pics back home and now he's 'Special Forces'. British General Slim had some stern warning in his book, Retreat into Victory about the pitfalls of having your best Soldiers, your 'cream' skimmed off into 'special', 'elite' units.

Large scale operations units need self-actualizers and go-getters, too. Slim was able to get some amazing 'special' performances out of his Soldiers and Wingate's CHINDITs showing LARGE UNITS CAN BE SPECIAL AND 'HIGH-SPEED', not just small ones that keep and reject a bunch of others out. Military excellence does not have to be a zero-sum game if egalitarian leaders like Chamberlain, Ridgway, Grange, Moore or a Gavin are in charge. Since we did not learn from Vietnam and are botching Iraq, its high time we learn how to stabilize a country larger than what a SF Group could handle; WE NEED A NON-LINEAR BATTLEFIELD STABILITY CORPS composed of adults, not narcissistic egomaniacs with scores to settle and manhoods to prove: Anything less than creating a Stability Corps and we will just repeat the same mistakes we made in Vietnam, but with Iraq listed as another failure to our resume. Www.truthdig.com/report/page2/20060627_ugly_americans_iraq Ugly Americans in Iraq Posted on Jun 27, 2006 Nir Rosen Pic: This was the scene in October of 2003 after U.S. Soldiers nearly broke the arms of a fragile elderly Iraqi man (in pink head-covering) as they tossed him 'zip-tied' to the ground during a raid in Husaybah, an Iraqi town near the Syrian border that is a suspected entry point for foreign insurgent fighters.

(This is not a photo of the U.S. Special Forces Soldier described in the article.) By Nir Rosen Editor's note: The following is an oral history of a U.S. Soldier who served with the Army's Special Forces during the allied occupation of Iraq in 2003 and 2004, as told to journalist Nir Rosen. It is a companion piece to Rosen's essay 'The Occupation of Iraqi Hearts and Minds,' which describes his experiences as an American reporter who sometimes passed as a Middle Easterner during the occupation. The oral history is composed almost entirely of e-mail correspondences that Rosen received from the Soldier, who wished to remain anonymous. About the Soldier: He served in Iraq during 2003 and 2004 as part of a Special Forces unit whose job, as he told Rosen, was to 'hunt enemies and destroy their networks' --to go after 'former masterminds and leaders of Saddam's Baath Party.' His targets soon morphed into members of 'Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia' and insurgents-'a broad term that extended to criminals, influential gangs, bomb-making masterminds and generally pissed-off Arabs across the Sunni Triangle laid off by CPA Order #2--which dismissed all Baath Party members.'

The Soldier left the Army in May 2005 but can be recalled in case of a 'national emergency.' He joked to Rosen that 'the day we invade Iran or North Korea is the day that I become a Canadian citizen.'

Rosen met the Soldier in Washington, D.C., during the spring of 2006 and struck up a friendship, 'feeling a bond,' in Rosen's words, 'that all who have served in Iraq in some way must feel.' About the Soldier's wish to remain anonymous, he wrote the following to Rosen: 'If my friends from the army even knew I was corresponding with a journalist, I'd probably lose a lot of respect. I am bound by legal contract and personal loyalty to protect the operational security (OPSEC) of my former unit. Because of the sensitivity of their work, their insane burden in Iraq (I still have friends in the military), and the oath of my contract, it is illegal for me to discuss many things-units we work with, equipment, locations, technology, and activity within the country, etc. Furthermore, as I was raised in the community of special operations, I am skeptical almost to the point of paranoia about talking to anyone about Iraq outside of my former unit and family. There is a good reason for this-namely: Loose lips sink ships.' Nir Rosen's account of the Soldier's oral history begins below.

My friend wanted to begin his recounting of his time in Iraq by discussing 'the character of the American men fighting this war.' He joked that 'it might be a shock to some of the architects of this war that our fighters don't read magazines like The Weekly Standard or The New Republic or give a rat's ass about where our occupation in Iraq is headed.' He continued: 'The reason most of them signed up for service (me included) was to get some action, destroy Al Qaeda and come home with a body count to brag about at a local bar.

Who gives a fuck about the rest? I think it can be best summed up in a conversation I overheard at my recruitment station. When one kid was asked why he joined the infantry, he didn't have any doubts: 'I enlisted to kill towelheads.' Photo essay: Nir Rosen presents a series of pictures that illustrate the brutal realities of the U.S. Occupation of Iraq 'The Occupation of Iraqi Hearts and Minds': Nir Rosen's companion piece to this oral history.

A description of what it's like to live under the boot of a culturally callous-and sometimes criminal-occupying force in Iraq. 'The very nature of special operations and the infantry is to kill and/or capture dangerous people, destroy shit and prevent attacks.

Creating rapport with the local population isn't really part of the vocabulary-especially if the local population is as insanely dangerous as Iraq. In the eyes of many fellow Soldiers who signed up because of 9/11, and because of the Bush administration's portrayal of Iraq as part of the 'war on terror,' many of the guys fully believed that they were in a hunt [for] men responsible for the blood bath in lower Manhattan.' My friend added that regardless of where Soldiers are, 'be that a foreign country or a local bar in a military town, they usually wear out their welcome anywhere they go-they've perfected the skill.' Nothing adds to the disconnect between U.S. Soldiers and the Iraqi populace like absolute miscommunication. We are astronauts and they are Martians, plain and simple. My friend stressed that 'our officers took extra special care to fully explain the Rules of Engagement (ROE) in formal briefings to men in my company, and over the course of 140 missions they practiced professional restraint with their actions.

But there is also a golden explicit rule with everything you do in war: Make sure that your ass comes home alive. This necessitates aggressive infantry platoon behavior on the part of the U.S. Military that ultimately results in something quite the opposite of our stated goals: 'building democracy' and winning 'hearts and minds.' While we were largely successful in hunting the men we were pursuing, my personal impression was that we probably created two times more insurgents than we caught, not to mention the communities we greatly angered with our raids. Our actions were a direct contribution to, as [allied commander] Gen. George Casey said in September 2005, an occupation that is 'fueling the insurgency.' ' He told me a story about his platoon's return to the U.S.

After its second deployment to Iraq, when its members went to see the premiere of the film 'Team America.' Made by the creators of television's 'South Park,' 'Team America' was a comical marionette action flick about a jingoistic fire team whose utter recklessness was matched by their righteous yahoo attitude that America must preserve the very fabric of civilization.

No film has more accurately depicted our presence in Iraq; it was a looking glass and it instantly became a platoon favorite. There is a classic scene in the movie where Team America's overbearing red, white and blue helicopter lands on top of a bazaar in the Middle East, crushing an Arab's cashew stand.

The side of the helicopter read: 'We Protect, We Serve, We Care.' That scene hit so close to home, it was scary. Later in the movie, in a high-speed chase against terrorists, a missile gets misfired and destroys the Sphinx (in Egypt). 'The movie theater, packed with guys from my platoon, was howling with laughter. We even sarcastically recited lines from the theme songs 'Freedom Isn't Free' and 'America, Fuck Yeah' before and after missions on our third tour in the winter of 2005. By then the disconnect between the lofty rhetoric of our leaders and the crap we dealt with on the ground couldn't have been greater.

The mentality of soldiers in Iraq is compounded by a group of factors-wrecked relationships, senselessly drawn-out deployments, sex/alcohol deprivation, and getting mortared on a nightly basis, to name a few.' He added that 'Iraq is a scary fucking place.

Every hard-hitting thing we did there was due in large part to our fear of that place.' My friend explained that over the course of his three deployments to Iraq he discovered what he described as a 'breakthrough method of communicating in foreign languages. It was so cutting-edge that Rosetta Stone [the language-training program] doesn't even know about it. It goes something like this: The louder you yell at an Arab in English, the more the Arab will understand you. I've seen this done by my brothers in arms on a hundred-plus occasions.

Hell, even I did it. And let me be the first to exclaim that it works wonders.

The language barrier has done irreversible damage to our entire occupation. 'On the rare occasions that we've had men who speak the language with us, it has yielded key information-in one case it almost resulted in the capture of a high-value target. I can't begin to imagine the kind of miscommunication damage we could have avoided had we had interpreters during two of our three deployments. Nothing adds to the disconnect between U.S.

Soldiers and the Iraqi populace like absolute miscommunication. We are astronauts and they are Martians, plain and simple. The average Soldier looks like Buzz Aldrin, loaded with enough high-tech gear to land him on the set of a sci-fi flick.

Every night we descend unexpectedly upon Mars from helicopters. Under the cover of darkness we prowl across mud-hut villages on the search for wanted Martians that communicate with each other in weird, harsh sounds. As a matter of fact, the glow on our eyes created from our night observation devices earned us a nickname by Sunni Arabs across Al Anbar; they called us the 'men with green eyes.' ' (Page 2) Many of his missions in the Anbar province of western Iraq involved 'ground insertion,' which meant that 'we had to shoot our vehicles through multiple narrow streets to hit the objective.

I remember one night vividly breaking the rear-view [mirrors] of every car parked on both sides of the street for three blocks, because our Stryker vehicle couldn't be accommodated on the road. When we reversed the vehicle after a wrong turn, we backed right into a Red Crescent van, putting a four-foot dent into the side of the ambulance and shattering its rear lights. Every time we went out, vehicular damage onto Iraqi-owned cars was always common in urban terrain.' One evening his unit thought it had a breakthrough of 'actionable intelligence,' he told me. 'Some leading figures in the insurgency were believed to be at a meeting in a farmhouse off the Euphrates River--some six officials in total. The mission was treated with an abnormal level of planning. We rolled out with a large group of men, using both ground and air assets.

When reaching the objective, men in the house burst out running in multiple directions. Brought just for that scenario was an attack dog trained to stop insurgents from getting away. Trained to attack the arms, he was sent to catch one of the fleeing men. By the time the guy returned, his arm was so torn up, it looked like it had been shot by an AK-47 7.62-millimeter round. We rushed the man back for immediate medical assistance. An American doctor sewed his arm back together.

After a thorough investigation, it was concluded that all six men had no intelligence value. Our interrogators smelled a rat, so they brought the accuser into the room of the men we captured. From what I heard, they were livid. 'He is a car thief! He is a criminal!' Apparently he was from a rival tribe and had a feud. 'They were taken back to their home, courtesy of the U.S.

'Oops, We Fucked Up' cab company. They dropped off all of the captured men and the accuser at the same location.

After all of the time and resources spent on that one, street justice was given its time to take care of that one. This would be one of the few cases that I was aware of when the innocent men were given reparations-medicine for the arm and $500, a decent sum by Iraqi standards.' The only ice cream my friend ever had in Iraq was when his unit raided an ice cream parlor run by two suspected resistance fighters in a major Sunni city. 'After grabbing them in a daytime raid in front of hundreds at a local souk,' he told me, 'we dumped enough of their ice cream to feed our entire platoon in one of our assault packs. By the time we got back to base, most of it had melted. A hole at the bottom of the pack made to let out water was flowing out with a stream of white vanilla cream onto the sand.

It must have been 110 degrees. We ate what we could and couldn't stop laughing about what had transpired.' By that point another platoon had very clearly disrupted prayer service, as testified by hundred of Sunni Arab men standing on the front landing of the mosque giving us what I could only refer to as the 'Arab look of death.' My friend described a 'highly planned mission that utilized many military assets. Over 200 special forces went on a head hunt against a high-value target in the heart of Al Anbar.'

The mission occurred at 1 p.m. On a Friday, prayer time in the Muslim world. 'What essentially transpired was the seizure of two central mosques right in the middle of prayer time-our target was believed to be in one of the mosques. Two other platoons were in charge of taking over three surrounding blocks of families 'sympathetic' to the insurgency. When we rolled up to the central mosque, you could see hundreds of pairs of shoes and sandals lined out by the front door. By the time my platoon had raided a local house, which including the standard demolition of a locked gate door with a linear charge, we launched into the family's two-story house with three fire teams.

Our entrance included accidentally stepping all over the family's freshly prepared lunch of salad and kabobs-Arabs typically eat on the floor. After kicking down every door, busting open every cabinet and flipping over every mattress, unearthing every prayer rug and breaking every lock in the house in the search for weapons and bombs, we proceeded to detain a 15-old-kid ('male of active age,' i.e. Possible insurgent) and tossed him in our Humvee while his mom cried and pleaded with us that he was innocent (at least that's what I thought she said-none of us had an Arabic vocabulary besides 'Shut up' 'Stop or I'll shoot' and 'Get the fuck out of my face'). 'It required a unique form of telepathic genius to understand the people we were liberating if you didn't understand Arabic, and none of us possessed that skill. After our block was pacified, we linked up down the road at the central mosque.

By that point another platoon had very clearly disrupted prayer service, as testified by hundred of Sunni Arab men standing on the front landing of the mosque giving us what I could only refer to as the 'Arab look of death.' Another team herded a line of stumbling blindfolded and handcuffed men like cattle into one of our vehicles.

By that time at least 20 of us had our weapons pointed at the Muslim congregation, not taking any chances. A fire team across the road was jumping over a nearby wall and breaking into a backyard shed. Two F-16s flew in figure eights overhead, buzzing the city and reminding any cavalier haji (our affectionate term for Arab citizen) that day to think twice before they act. 'We detained some 15 men, including the target's brother (the main target was apparently a no-show that day).

We rolled out staring at a thoroughly humiliated community on their most sacred day. Their home doors blown off their hinges, some of their teenage children stolen by Kafirs, and in the house that I raided, a hard-earned lunch kicked across the dirty floor. We would later return to the same neighborhood three times during that deployment, looking for the same guy. Each time, doors were blown off their recently repaired hinges, house glass was broken, car tires were slashed, the few interior possessions found in the houses were thrown around, damaged and destroyed.

But still, we couldn't find the guy we were looking for. We would go on to conduct a follow-on mission on that specific day, raiding a building reported to house 'eight hard-core Syrian fighters.' We blew down the door with electrical charging tape to find a broken Kawasaki dirt bike. We also went down the road to an elementary school (school was out that day) that was reported to be an arms cache for the insurgency, and our orders were to raid the entire building. After breaking into one room only to find school books, one of our officers.

Called back the mission and decided any further damage to the school was folly, given the apparent effort to win 'hearts and minds' across Iraq.' (Page 3) One summer evening my friend's unit targeted a sheik who was reportedly a mastermind of the resistance.

The sheik lived in a mansion behind a tire store, my friend recalled. 'He reportedly had the material and spiritual support of the surrounding area. Thus, the objective of our mission would be not just to capture the sheik, but to capture every male in the entire neighborhood for intelligence about the sheik. I was in the fire team whose objective was to raid the house next door to the sheik's. Approaching the house, we tried to enter in text-book fashion- using something called the 'hooligan tool' to break the lock on the front door. 'After two unsuccessful tries, we used a steel rammer, which did nothing but break the glass on the door. Then we went with Plan C- we turned the door handle on the door next to the one we were trying to break.

The door was unlocked. Our two teams then flowed in, full of yelling to add to the shock value of our dynamic entry. 'Get the fuck down,' 'Shut the fuck up,' 'Don't move,' etc. Of the four rooms in the house, two were full of women and children, the other a kitchen, and the fourth, a middle-aged man and a senior citizen. Three of our men rushed the man while the old man on an oxygen tank starting hitting a couple of us with his cane.

The old man was quickly dropped to the floor, next to his oxygen tank, while we zip-tied his arms and legs. This wasn't out of personal preference, but we were trying to control the situation.

I walked out the blindfolded middle-aged man, who was weak and fell to his knees, trembling and mortified. His wife and two daughters were crying hysterically. I can only guess that they thought I was going to execute him. I wish I knew enough Arabic to tell him that things would be OK if he was innocent-but honestly, why should I be confident enough to say that? Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been thrown in detention facilities across the country with incompetent oversight and filtering processes. Even if I did know Arabic, I probably wouldn't want to tell him the honest truth: 'Sir, after you leave here, I'm sorry, but I have no fucking idea what's going to happen to you.' 'After consolidating the detainees we got the orders to clear the surrounding structures.

After running with two fire teams across a typical Iraqi backyard farm, we used a shot gun to blast open the door lock. Unbeknownst to us, we were about to score a major intelligence victory in the war on terror: a den of 40 smelly goats. We immediately took one casualty on that raid-a goat got hit in the ass with one of the buckshots. If our raid on 20 homes wasn't yet successful in waking up everyone in the neighborhood, then that pissed-off goat sure did the job. We had to seek cover on the rear side of the building as another team 'leapfrogged' to an adjacent house.

In all of our distraction, the goats poured out of their den. When we eventually left the objective, I saw the group of goats wandering down the main highway that we had taken on our way to the sheik's crib.

We just had conducted a raid of liberation. I was reminded of one of Gen. [Anthony] Zinni's early warnings about Iraq: 'There are congressmen today who want to fund the Iraqi Liberation Act, and let some silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London gin up an expedition. We'll equip a thousand fighters and arm them with 97 million dollars' worth of AK-47s and insert them into Iraq. And what will we have? A Bay of Goats, most likely.' Just add 130,000 U.S.

Soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars to the equation and the statement still stands. 'Acting on intelligence and orders beyond our control, we succeeded that night in sending a father of four off to who knows where, losing his livestock livelihood that barely made ends meet, detaining five others guilty of living in that neighborhood and finding no sheik. Before departing, I remember a wild dog staring at me in the eye as he consumed the flesh of a fellow dead dog. Our presence didn't seem to faze him.

On the way back from this glorious mission, we came onto an unexpected surprise. To our great amusement, in the middle of desert nowhere (the closest village was eight miles away), we found two men engaged in passionate homosexual intercourse on top a sand dune. I don't think they were expecting any extra company. I guess nowhere was safe in Al Anbar from the U.S. My friend quipped that 'infantry Soldiers have never been known for their raw talent in mathematics.' Therefore the explosives charges made by Soldiers sometimes exceed the bare minimum necessary to blow off a door handle. 'In one case,' he told me, 'I watched a charge succeed in blowing a door five feet across a living room.

Being as the suspect was about to open the door after hearing the ruckus on his doorstep, he went airborne as well. And the steel door landed on top of him.

Like in a scene out of the movie 'Heat,' blood and puss flowed down both of his ears on the trip back to base.' (Page 4) During the summer, my friend's unit temporarily inhabited one of Uday Hussein's palaces on the Tigris River. 'It was fully furnished with gold-leaf furniture,' he said, 'working bidets and a nice swimming pool. As the story goes, he had women walk in circles by the pool and he chose which one to rape for the evening.

We just used the pool to forget about the fact that we were in Iraq. That summer our tanning sessions by the pool were often interrupted by mortar attacks on our compound. Apparently the chain of command threatened a scorched-earth policy on the surrounding farm communities if they didn't put a stop to whoever was doing it.

We also did our part by directing warning shots at local fishermen floating slowly down the Tigris River and staring at the compound. If they didn't get the point the first time, we shot closer to their boat. They would get the message and start rowing like Vikings on speed until they were out of our eyesight. It was only in our self-interest to keep all unwanted activity away from our bases. By the summer of 2004, all trust had fully dissipated.'

My friend was rare in that he had and was able to critically assess his role in Iraq. 'In hindsight,' he said, 'I have often asked myself what my reaction would be like if I were on the opposite end of this equation. After years of living under a harsh dictatorship, 150,000 Soldiers of Sharia show up and offload into Georgetown from boats on the Potomac River after shelling the Capitol. They have a simple mission, they say: transplanting Islamic enlightenment in the decadent land of Kafir. They take over the D.C.

Mall and throw a wall around the Smithsonian buildings; they call it the 'Halal Zone.' The White House becomes the embassy of Iraq. Some asshole like John Walker Lindh (Ahmed Chalabi), who has lived in the Middle East while the U.S. Suffered under dictatorship, is Iraq's favorite child for taking over the peacock throne of the U.S. My house gets raided and my mother patted down by hygiene-deficient Wahhabis, so I go to Georgetown to force the humiliation off my mind. A group of wirey majahedin show up at Haagen Daaz while I'm enjoying a cone of cookies and cream-a rare moment of bliss in a country going to shit-and grab the owners while taking their ice cream. I return to my home, after walking through one foot of raw sewage water, to turn on the radio and hear the Arab 'viceroy' declare in a fatwa that all Christian values should be erased from our governing culture.

Meanwhile my dad is laid off from his paycheck for the crime of serving in the U.S. Army to provide for his struggling family.'

My friend concluded that 'without much doubt in my mind, if I were an Iraqi under the U.S. Occupation, I'd be an insurgent.' When you put your life on the line every night, you don't have the luxury to be skeptical or even critical.

I sympathized with what must have been his painful realization that he had inadvertently committed crimes. 'All the way up to my third deployment I was an avid reader of a lot of foolish writing on the war,' he said. 'I believed in the mission because I had to-after all, what Soldier wants to die for an unworthy cause? I wanted to believe in the propaganda and I willfully avoided things that harshly rubbed against my hope that we were sacrificing for a good cause. When you put your life on the line every night, you don't have the luxury to be skeptical or even critical. In certain ways, I feel embarrassed about my belief that this was once a noble mission, but I have the honesty to admit that I was wrong.

I deployed to this war with many great assumptions about our national leadership: I assumed that the WMD intelligence case wasn't a cherry-picked house of cards, I assumed we had a plan for the aftermath of the invasion, I assumed our leaders had a greater understanding of the character of Iraq outside the mouths of Ahmed Chalabi and Kana Makiya. I assumed, I assumed, I assumed.' 'As a Soldier trained exclusively to fight, destroy and capture,' my friend said, 'I was no more different than any of the rest of the men in my platoon who viewed Iraq as a broken country, loaded with assassins and inhospitable people. Hardly any of us spoke Arabic, which added to the dehumanization of the people (or should I say, 'targets') that we hunted and disrupted on a nightly basis; during my time there we conducted over 140 missions. We were always decent to the men we captured, but a raid by definition can never be a humanitarian act. I could never escape the impression from our heavy-handed insertions into hundreds of family homes that our presence only fueled more and more hatred. Every night we returned to base, the adrenaline rush faded and everything in hindsight looked like a black comedy.

You couldn't escape the fact that our actions only fueled the insurgency. For every insurgent or jihadist we caught, we created two times as many future fighters. And that is the tragedy- good men inadvertently pissing off an entire population. As our fearless leaders walked into this debacle without a plan, you can rest assured that few at the top ever considered the historical meaning of occupation to Arab civilization. Also, the White House fixation on figureheads like Zarqawi, which bolstered the Al Qaeda/Iraq smokescreen, ensured that our myopic obsession with foreign fighters blinded us to the understanding that 90% of the insurgency was home-grown.' SOLUTION: Learn from Iraq Debacle: Non-Linear Battlefield Stability Corps (NLB-SC OR SNC-C) Needed Its highly likely and lusting for linear Nation-State Wars (NSW) as Iraq/Afghanistan are chalked up as ' another Vietnam'; a non-linear conflict we couldn't sort out in our heads and come up with a winning strategy (CONOPS).

Dedicated Stability Force with Moral Compass At some point, America will have to fight again to overthrow an enemy country and if we do not figure out how to create a friendly government in its aftermath, our nation-state foes will take a time-out, let us take the capital city and then proceed to defeat us with an insurgency/rebellion/guerrilla war. To prevent us from botching the aftermath of a nation-state war, we propose a Non-Linear Battlefield or Sub-National Conflict Stability Corps (NLB-SC OR SNC-C) filled by 50, 000 active-duty volunteers from all the armed services but would report directly to the President of the U.S. And get funding directly from Congress.

Another option would be to designate 3 mid-west National Guard divisions full of hopefully more mature 25-40 year olds not involved in border security missions to be the NLB-SC OR SNC-C. Retired Army Colonel Robert Killebrew proposes we should have formed a 'MACV-Iraq' (Military Assistance Command after Victory, we keep the 'V' in there because it sounds better and salutes the Vietnam MACV and reminds the listener of the past precedent) during the planning phase leading up to the Iraq invasion, securing from Congress the necessary funds and authority to reconstitute the Iraqi Army, police and government. A 'MACV-Iraq' could insist on using older NG troops, armored tracks (M113 Gavins are plentiful) IF the people putting the MACV-Iraq together are WISE. There's no guarantee that a kill/capture nation-state mentality staff like CENTCOM would do any better setting up a MACV-Iraq then it did doing 'Phase IV' planning this last time, but its an idea worth considering. The following articles show the pitfalls of taking the garrison Army/marine general's lawn care Soldiers and giving them guns in a foreign land. The articles below offer yet more proof that we need a Non-Linear Battlefield Stability Corps composed of older NG or screened-beforehand active-duty Soldiers in ARMORED TRACKS who understand civilian life to do COIN/SASO not active duty prove-their-manhood, young, dumb-and-full-of-you know-what, types walking on foot and in vulnerable Humvee trucks who are obsessed with kill/capture and have no idea what civilian life is about because they play ' From Here to Eternity' garrison make-believe 24/7/365.

KEY QUOTE: 'Wood said the decreasing dependence on reservists is counterintuitive. They believe aggressive operations by combat-centric Soldiers have escalated a primarily political battle that requires a vast amount of non-combat skills.' Atlanta Journal-Constitution Jul.

Anne Lamott’s () is among my — a treasure trove of insight both practical and profound, timelessly revisitable and yielding deeper resonance each time. Lamott adds to with equal parts candor and conviction, teaching us as much about writing as she does about creativity at large and, even beyond that, about being human and living a full life — because, after all, as Lamott notes in the beginning, writing is nothing more nor less than a sensemaking mechanism for life: One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around. What makes Lamott so compelling is that all of her advice comes not from the ivory tower of the pantheon but from an honest place of exquisite vulnerability and hard-earned life-wisdom. She recounts her formative years and where she headed once she encountered that inevitable fork in the road where we can choose between being shut in and shut down by our traumatic experiences, or using them as fertile clay for character-building: I started writing when I was seven or eight. Grand Ages Rome Serial Keygen Torrent. I was very shy and strange-looking, loved reading above everything else, weighed about forty pounds at the time, and was so tense that I walked around with my shoulders up to my ears, like Richard Nixon. I saw a home movie once of a birthday party I went to in the first grade, with all these cute little boys and girls playing together like puppies, and all of a sudden I scuttled across the screen like Prufrock’s crab.

I was very clearly the one who was going to grow up to be a serial killer, or keep dozens and dozens of cats. Instead, I got funny. I got funny because boys, older boys I didn’t even know, would ride by on their bicycles and taunt me about my weird looks. Each time felt like a drive-by shooting.

I think this is why I walked like Nixon: I think I was trying to plug my ears with my shoulders, but they wouldn’t quite reach. So first I got funny and then I started to write, although I did not always write funny things. [] All I ever wanted was to belong, to wear that hat of belonging. In seventh and eighth grades I still weighed about forty pounds.

I was twelve years old and had been getting teased about my strange looks for most of my life. This is a difficult country to look too different in — the United States of Advertising, as Paul Krassner puts it — and if you are too skinny or too tall or dark or weird or short or frizzy or homely or poor or nearsighted, you get crucified.

So she found refuge in books, searching for “some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organizing it in [her] head.” To find that, she became a writer and began fantasizing about getting published, about “the thrill of seeing oneself in print,” as the highest form of existential validation. When she published her first book, she awaited the affirming grandeur of public approval and secretly thought that “trumpets would blare, major reviewers would proclaim that not since Moby Dick had an American novel so captured life in all of its dizzying complexity.” Of course, none of this happened — not with the first book, nor the second or third or fourth or fifth. Instead, what Lamott found was a deeper kind of reward — that sensation “unmerited grace” that Annie Dillard so eloquently captured in. Lamott echoes and reflects: I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.

That thing you had to force yourself to do — the actual act of writing — turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony.

The act of writing turns out to be its own reward. [] I tell my students that the odds of their getting published and of it bringing them financial security, peace of mind, and even joy are probably not that great. Ruin, hysteria, bad skin, unsightly tics, ugly financial problems, maybe; but probably not peace of mind. I tell them that I think they ought to write anyway.

But, one might wonder, why? Lamott answers beautifully: My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment.

Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested. But I also tell [my students] that sometimes when my writer friends are working, they feel better and more alive than they do at any other time. And sometimes when they are writing well, they feel that they are living up to something. It is as if the right words, the true words, are already inside them, and they just want to help them get out. Writing this way is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it. For her, the essence of writing is about something simple, something immutable about being human: Good writing is about telling the truth.

We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. [] Hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate. Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.

At the heart of writing, Lamott argues, lies a capacity for quiet and a willingness to decondition the all too human tendency to get so overwhelmed by the enormity of the journey that we’re too paralyzed to take the first step. She recounts this wonderful anecdote, after which the book is titled: Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.

Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” In this bird-by-bird approach to writing, there is no room for perfectionism. (Neil Gaiman famously advised, and David Foster Wallace admonished, ) Lamott cautions: Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people.

It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. [] Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here — and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing. Lamott echoes Susan Sontag ( and offers a beautiful definition of what it means to be a writer: Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on.

[] The writer is a person who is standing apart, like the cheese in “The Farmer in the Dell” standing there alone but deciding to take a few notes. You’re outside, but you can see things up close through your binoculars. Your job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision. Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense.

Then you can recognize others. In a sentiment reminiscent of, Lamott considers the core of being a writer: To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on. That is, one needs to have a moral position. (I myself have long believed that the role of a great writer — or editor, or “curator,” or any other custodian of cultural values — is to frame for people what matters in the world and why.) — a notion Lamott considers in the context of that necessary moral position: As we live, we begin to discover what helps in life and what hurts, and our characters act this out dramatically.

This is moral material. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you. We are all in danger now and have a new everything to face, and there is no point gathering an audience and demanding its attention unless you have something to say that is important and constructive. My friend Carpenter says we no longer need Chicken Little to tell us the sky is falling, because it already has. The issue now is how to take care of one another.

She finds in writing — profound awe, deep reverence, a source of spiritual elevation: In order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?

Think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. Think of those times when you’ve read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone’s soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of — please forgive me — wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious.

[] There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness... Most of all, however, Lamott sees in writing not a selfish act of personal gratification but an act of warm generosity — which is, after all, what drives all of us who wake up in the morning to put something we love into the world and go to bed at night glad that we did: If you give freely, there will always be more. It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host, of hosting people, of being the person to whom they come for food and drink and company. This is what the writer has to offer. This mutual gratification is where the mesmerism of literature lies: Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.

When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship. Is an absolute must-read, and must-reread, in its entirety. Complement it with, which inspired Lamott, and, which was inspired by Lamott. For more notable advice on writing, see Elmore Leonard’s, Walter Benjamin’s, H.

Lovecraft’s, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, Zadie Smith’s, David Ogilvy’s, Henry Miller’s, Jack Kerouac’s, John Steinbeck’s, and Susan Sontag’s.