Errors mar my war blogging!

This monstrosity of a story is a perfect example of why I am not now, and never will be, a "war blogger." Today's Philadelphia Inquirer features a huge headline, "Errors mar military win in Iraq" -- underneath of which are two different stories -- one about the "mutiny" (which turns out to be a refusal to drive supply trucks), and the other about....

Well, what is this about? 1992 or 2003?

Errors mar military win in Iraq

Second of three parts.

This story was reported by Inquirer Washington Bureau reporters Joseph L. Galloway, Jonathan S. Landay, Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott.

WASHINGTON - In 1992, the United States launched a covert psychological warfare operation to convince regular Iraqi soldiers that they could keep their jobs if war came and they didn't fight for Saddam Hussein. The pledge was made in leaflets dropped from aircraft, in clandestine radio broadcasts, in covert contacts with Iraqi officers, and in U.S. public statements.

But when war came, the United States broke its promises.

As U.S. forces advanced, regular Iraqi soldiers abandoned their arms and ran away in droves. Yet in one of his first orders as the U.S. overseer of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer in 2003 disbanded the entire Iraqi army.

Bremer's order deprived U.S. commanders of men they had planned to recall to help keep order and secure Iraq's borders. It compounded the problems created by the Bush administration's failure to plan for securing Iraq and its mistaken estimate of how many U.S. troops it would take to do that. It threw legions of angry, defeated Iraqis out of work, handed the budding anti-U.S. insurgency a recruiting windfall, and fueled suspicions that the United States had come not to liberate Iraq but to seize its oil.

Is this about Bremer's incompetence? Or broken promises in 1992? Authors Galloway, Landay, Strobel & Walcott never quite make it clear. Perhaps they want the readers to make the tie-in themselves without having to really commit to the story.

Must be tough to have four authors write one article. I can't imagine having to do that in this blog; while there are now three contributors, each one of us writes independently. More streamlined that way; it helps avoid the kind of editorial and stylistic quagmire which Inquirer readers are forced to slog through.

Bremer may well have been incompetent, but he's out of there. Beyond that, I have no idea what to make of the story. (It doesn't have anything to do with the election in two weeks, does it?)

As to the supply trucks, there seems to be a problem with armoring them, and with getting the soldiers to obey orders.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S. Army Reserve soldiers who refused orders to drive a dangerous route were members of one of a few supply units whose trucks are still unarmored, their commanding general said Sunday.

The soldiers, now under investigation, had previously focused on local missions in safer parts of southern Iraq and had never driven a convoy north along the attack-prone roads passing through Baghdad.

"Not all of their trucks are completely armored. In their case, they haven't had the chance to get armored," said Brig. Gen. James E. Chambers, commanding general of 13th Corps Support Command, which sends some 250 convoys ferrying Army fuel, food and ammunition across Iraq each day.

What with Michael Moore orchestrating the shipment of thousands of Fahrenheit 9/11 DVDs to the troops, it's a wonder that any of them will do anything. And considering what I've read about the commanding general, one Brigadier General James E. Chambers, it's understandable why he'd be losing the PR war to Michael Moore:
Then there's Brig. Gen. James E. Chambers, the commanding general of 13th COSCOM in Balad, Iraq, where morale is lower than clam dung. Chambers’ latest exercise in non-leadership was to have a unit in his command reschedule a memorial service for a dead soldier originally set for Aug. 13. The reported reason: The superstitious general was not about to incur bad luck by flying on the 13th.

I’ve previously blistered Chambers’ command in this column for proposing to charge soldiers three bucks a head to see movies at the newly rebuilt base theater and nine uxorious bucks for a pizza while meanwhile failing to ensure that truckers had sufficient armor on their vehicles to protect them from guerrilla attacks.

Apparently, these probes are beginning to get to Gen. Jimmie, who recently put out the word reminding everyone serving under him of the “regulatory requirements for Information Security and proper Public Affairs information release and dissemination,” according to a source who’s asked not to be identified for fear of being burned at the stake.

"I immediately thought, ‘I’ll bet this is because Hack nailed ol’ Jimmie again,’ ” the whistle-blower writes. “Then this morning one of Jimmie’s deputies said at a staff meeting, ‘It’s to remind people they can’t be writing to Hackworth and s***.’ I guess ‘and s***’ includes any attempts to exercise their rights under Article One of the Bill of Rights – as well as embarrassing their CG."

Jimmie’s big into protection – not only of his career, but also of his own precious butt. To secure the latter, he had a ring of huge, concrete barriers erected around his VIP trailer complex quarters a full two and a half months before even 10 percent of his soldiers had any mortar or blast protection around their digs. The “Texas barriers” were placed with no gaps between them except for two breaks to allow the residents a walk-through – while nowhere else on this general’s base are any other soldiers afforded this airtight quality of force protection.

Nope. Gen. Jimmie’s soldiers try to survive with only one large ring – with many gaps – around mini-zones consisting of some 40-50 trailers. So only one side of any trailer on the perimeter gets any protection – unless you’re lucky enough to live on a corner. The rest of the trailers are shrapnel magnets, and – since attacks against American forces across Iraq have increased from 25 a day a year ago to 100 a day – enemy mortar attacks are an almost daily event.

But what do I know? There's also Chambers' official biography here, with a picture. He was a schoolteacher from Oklahoma, and now he's a supply officer who can't get his trucks armored but lives in a fortress, then complains when his men stage a "mutiny" for Dan Rather.

Look, all I know is I want the war to be won. The job of the military is to figure out how to do that. This is turning into a PR war, and I am at a serious disadvantage, because I am not there, and I am forced to rely on incomplete, constantly changing stories from people with varying degrees of bias. And anything I write is only as reliable as the sources on which I have to rely.

I'd rather wait till the victory.

posted by Eric on 10.18.04 at 08:22 AM





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