Democrats Launch Series of Strategy Sessions on Iraq War
    By Thomas D. Williams
    t r u t h o u t | Report

    Wednesday 06 December 2006

    The House Democratic Caucus met Tuesday in closed session with three experienced critics of the Bush administration's conduct of the war in Iraq to work out a proposed war-extrication plan.

    The session was closed to allow legislators to freely speak their mind about the war, its consequences and the future, said Kristie Greco, caucus communications director. Its purpose was to allow the three experts to further educate both the freshmen and the more experienced House representatives, she said. "We hope to use this [forum] as a launching pad [for future discussions], not a formal report," she said. The caucus includes all Democratic representatives and "seeks to achieve consensus and to ensure members have the tools to implement it," says its web site.

    The caucus experts, Dr. Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Richard Holbrooke, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, and Major General John Batiste, a former Army Iraq war infantry commander, have been publicly acerbic on the handling of the war. They have written and spoken out about what they believe is an ill-conceived, ongoing presidential plan to claim victory without full consideration of the cost in lives and taxpayer dollars.

    US congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker-designate and a frequent harsh critic of President George Bush, announced the forum to flush out fresh ideas. Afterward, she said: "What we heard today is that there are no easy answers in Iraq. It's a difficult challenge for our country, and it requires our fullest attention and decision-making that is hard-nosed to make a new direction. We predicated some of the conversation on a letter that Senator Harry Reid (the next Senate majority leader), myself and others in the leadership sent to the president on October 20."

    "At that time," she said, "we reiterated our concern that 'stay the course' was not a strategy, but a slogan. We urged the president to work with us in a bipartisan way and we presented four changes to current policy: first, redeployment and transition of our troops out of Iraq; second, disarm the militia; third, have an international conference to discuss with the countries in the region the stability and reconstruction of the region, especially Iraq; and fourth, to amend the constitution to relieve some of the civil strife and to spread some of the political advantages that the elections there promised. We have not heard back from the president on that. We still extend the hand of friendship to him in a bipartisan way to make our country safer, to make the region more stable, and to strengthen our military."

    The forum moved into operation a day before the Iraq Study Group, chaired by former Republican secretary of state James A. Baker III, a close advisor to former president George H.W. Bush, releases its recommendations to his son, the president, and the Congress. A story in the New York Times Monday said the group is expected to recommend a graduated pullout of US troops in Iraq by early 2008 and a change in operations from combat to training and supporting Iraqi units.

    However, meanwhile in Afghanistan, a joint Pentagon and State Department study creates foreboding, dark clouds for future military security training in Iraq. That study concludes that despite the US training of Afghan police, they are incapable of carrying out run-of-the-mill police work. Managers of the $1.1 billion training program don't even know how many police are on duty, says the study, or where thousands of trucks and other equipment issued to police units have gone.

    And, while Congressional and presidential debate has been heating up for months over the violent consequences of the Iraq War and similar problems in Afghanistan, little concentrated attention has been paid to tragic human consequences or to hazardous wartime exposures of soldiers in both those wars, or to Iraqi and Afghan civilians and soldiers. Although congressmen, presidential spokespersons and other federal officials often mention wartime death totals for US troops - now reaching 2,889 - neither they nor the national media focus on whether those with illnesses are getting proper care. And accurate tabulations of the killings and particularly sicknesses of Afghan and Iraqi civilians from those conflicts are difficult to find and corroborate.

    A total of 205,097, or 32.5 percent, of eligible US veterans who served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been treated at US Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals, the VA says. A total of 144,227, or 22.9 percent, of those eligible veterans, those same figures say, have received VA readjustment mental health counseling.

    In the meantime, the VA says thousands of service members in both wars have become sick after being exposed to US depleted-uranium munitions; lariam, a drug given to the troops to combat malaria; leishmaniasis, contracted through bloodsucking sand flies; desert heat; stress; and other combat-related hazards. Thousands more service members have complained of adverse reactions to the vaccine they have been forced to take to protect them from anthrax spores, a biological weapon, which historically has been seldom used.

    The two wars appear to mirror the earlier problems suffered by more than 300,000 veterans of the first Gulf War, who had to battle the government for years to get federally-assisted health care. Some never got what they needed and died, or are still sick. Only a handful of congressmen have focused their attention on these veterans or on the unsolved health problems of veterans of the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. And fewer congressmen have focused efforts on the US use of hazardous depleted-uranium munitions, whose explosions cause inhalation of dangerous radioactive dust, or the mandatory use of the anthrax vaccine, which has led thousands of service members to leave the armed services rather than be forced to take it.

    Since Tuesday's Democratic forum on the Iraq War was closed, reports on it were limited to an arranged news "stakeout" as participants walked through doors in Congress or a press conference afterward. There are, however, clear indications in advance about the three well-known forum advisors' positions on the war.

    "I think the president used freedom, democracy and elections almost interchangeably, and we know from painful experience that they're not," Mathews said on the Charlie Rose Show in September. "Elections ... which is used over and over again as the measure of progress - elections without a rule of law, and without institutions that can deliver government services and, very important, without protection for minority rights - elections in those circumstances don't give you democracy in the way Americans think about it. They give you chaos, and they give you sectarian violence, because people are trying to protect their own interests."

    In a 2004 Washington Post op-ed article, Mathews said: "The president - no one 0aless - needs to state formally and unequivocally that the United States will 0anot maintain a permanent military presence in Iraq, and to repeat it at every 0aopportunity. The phrase 'enduring bases' should be erased and the construction 0aof permanent facilities halted. A transparent mechanism that makes clear that 0ano Iraqi oil revenue will touch American fingers should be created, and 0aquestions about what happened to that revenue over the past year should be 0aquickly and forthrightly answered."

    "The US Embassy should be drastically cut in size," Mathews explained, "and moved outside the Green Zone (to Camp Victory, for instance) to emphasize that the United States is no longer running the country and that it and the Iraqi government are not one and the same. A statement signed jointly by Iraq's neighbors should pledge the United States and each of them to respect Iraq's territorial integrity within its present borders."

    Batiste, a heavy critic of former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, is one of seven retired generals to go public with their protests about Rumsfeld's handling of the war. "The mission in Iraq is all about breaking the cycle of violence and the hard work to change attitudes and give the Iraqi people alternatives to the insurgency," said Batiste. "You cannot do this with precision bombs from 30,000 feet," Batiste told a Congressional committee earlier. "This is tough, dangerous and very personal work. Numbers of boots on the ground and hard-won relationships matter. What should have been a deliberate victory is now an uncertain and protracted challenge."

    In a report to Congress before the war started, Holbrooke said international support is essential for a successful outcome in Iraq. "The road to Baghdad runs through the United Nations Security Council." Holbrooke said. Otherwise the United States will weaken its position and lose support unnecessarily, he explained.

    More recently, in an October 24 op-ed article in the Washington Post, Holbrooke wrote: "Broadly speaking, you have three choices: 'Stay the course,' escalate or start to disengage from Iraq while pressing hard for a political settlement. I will argue for the third course, not because it is perfect but because it is the least bad option. Whatever else you do, Mr. President, you should send American troops to northern Iraq (Kurdistan), which is still safe but increasingly tense, to reduce the very real risk of a Turkish-Kurdish war."

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    Thomas "Dennie" Williams is a former state and federal court reporter, specializing in investigations, for the Hartford Courant for over three decades. Since the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, he has written hundreds of articles on wartime hazardous exposures like depleted-uranium munitions; on the controversial anthrax vaccine; and on the consistent failures of the federal government to assist sick veterans of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans.