This Iraqi Life

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Prologue

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Today the blog comes to you in three acts…Three acts in honor of This American Life. So, to warn you, it would take a colossal effort to get through this entry in one sitting if you listen to all of the “This American Life” episodes. The Prologue covers the basics, yet the entire entry expresses the urgency that inspired this blog. So, please skim at your content, dwell where you will, and return if it so pleases you.

Ira Glass and his crew at This American Life has done a wonderful job of presenting even-handed fringe media—reporting that is not accountable to advertising dollars or corporate hierarchy. I’m sure their coverage looks outrageously liberal to many on the right side of our national spectrum yet I hear a real effort by their producers to present “This American Life” instead of “This Liberal Left Life”. There is a whole catalog of Iraq coverage that reveals a side of the war you won’t see in the main stream media. Here are a few that I highly recommend:

• “The Balloon Goes Up” Episode 235 = First Act-Bombs over Baghdad! Issam Shukri is an Iraqi man, living in Canada. He lived in Bagdad when it was bombed during the first gulf war. He talks with Ira about how scary it was when the ground started shaking and the streetlights suddenly blinked out, and how hard it was to explain to his three-year old son. (12 minutes)

• “What’s in a Number?” Episode 300 = About a year ago (October 2004, so it was two years ago), a study estimated the number of Iraqi casualties since the war began. It came up with a number – 100,000 dead – that was higher than any other estimate, and was mostly ignored. This week, Alex Blumberg revisits that study to look at the reality behind it. In Act One he reports that not only is the study probably accurate, but it says that most of the deaths were caused by Coalition forces (despite concerted efforts to avoid civilian casualties).

• “Habeas Schmabeas” Episode 310 = The right of habeas corpus has been a part of this country’s legal tradition longer than we’ve actually been a country. It means the government has to explain why it’s holding a person in custody. But now, the war on terror has nixed many of the rules we used to think of as fundamental. At Guantanamo Bay, our government initially claimed that the prisoners should not be covered by habeas – or even by the Geneva Conventions – because they’re the most fearsome terrorist enemies we have. But is that true? Is it a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of our mistakes?

This American Life

If the Bush cadre would have stopped with Afghanistan and focused on the job there, they would have so much more support right now. It truly would be a different world. True, we would still have an assault on Habeus Corpus and the Geneva Conventions from the Republicans, yet United States power would be so much stronger right now.

Sometimes the United States needs to use the military, that’s why we have it, and after 9/11 an attack on the Talliban in Afghanistan still seems appropriate. Instead we had an abrupt shift of focus to a second military front, a display of arrogant American power that was ready to take on the world, and our leadership had to resort to deceit about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq to persuade the American people to go along with their plans. The only quantifiable result for the hundreds of billions of dollars allocated to the Iraq War, after three and half years of U.S. occupation, is the mass murder of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi’s. They are still waiting for a government that can provide them security.

How has the United States treated the Iraq people since we began our occupation? How many are dead because of this war in Iraq? Is their anyone who is accountable for this debacle?

The first act is a passage from the New York Times Magazine called “What the War did Col. Sassaman”. The article depicts an intimate view of an Army unit commander in the early days of the insurgency in Iraq. It gives you a great answer to “why they hate us”, at least “why they hate us in Iraq.”

The second act looks at the number of those who have died in Iraq. The U.S. press is obsessed with counting the American dead, particularly the soldiers. What about the Iraqi’s? Why don’t we count their dead and mourn their loss on the nightly news? Don’t their lives matter as much as ours?

With all that is wrong with the Iraq war and as arrogant as the Republican leadership was in sending our troops off to war you would think that some of them would be noble enough to stand up and be held accountable. Nope. They say ‘stay the course’. Act Three is “Maj. General John Batiste’s testimony before Sen. Democratic Policy Committee”. This is the speech in which he states “our Department of Defense’s leadership is extraordinarily bad, and our Congress is only today, more than five years into this war, beginning to exercise its oversight responsibilities.”

I recommend reading the General’s entire speech yet I feel like giving away the punch line here:

“Secretary Rumsfeld’s dismal strategic decisions resulted in the unnecessary deaths of American servicemen and women, our allies, and the good people of Iraq. He was responsible for America and her allies going to war with the wrong plan and a strategy that did not address the realities of fighting an insurgency. He violated fundamental principles of war, dismissed deliberate military planning, ignored the hard work to build the peace after the fall of Saddam Hussein, set the conditions for Abu Ghraib and other atrocities that further ignited the insurgency, disbanded Iraqi security force institutions when we needed them most, constrained our commanders with an overly restrictive de-Ba’athification policy, and failed to seriously resource the training and equipping of the Iraqi security forces as our main effort.”

Does this leave the Republican led congress off the hook? The General continues:

“Through all of this, our Congressional oversight committees were all but silent and not asking the tough questions, as was done routinely during both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. Our Congress shares responsibility for what is and is not happening in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

An aggressive off-the-leash Executive Branch, a Congress bowing down to an Imperial Presidency, is bad democratic practice.

Joseph Nye, Jr. concludes, “Even when mistaken policies reduce our attractiveness, our ability to openly criticize and correct our mistakes makes us attractive to others at a deeper level.”

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Now we arrive at act one…
Act One: What the War did to Colonel Sassaman

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New York Times Magazine>
October 23,2005
Written by Dexter Filkins (edited moonshiner)

Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, unit commander for the United States Army in Iraq, commanded 800 soldiers in the heart of the insurgency ravaged Sunni Triangle. The events in this passage take place in October and November of 2003, seven months into the US occupation of Iraq.

“By this time the Iraqi insurgency was in full bloom. The holy month of Ramadan, beginning in October 2003, had coincided with a surge in attacks and American combat deaths. The insurgents were acting with greater sophistication every day, shooting down American helicopters, mortaring American bases, even firing rockets at Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy defense secretary. In Samarra, the guerrillas had made so much mayhem that the American unit in charge of the town had abandoned its bases.

The emergence of the Iraqi insurgency stunned senior American commanders, who had planned for a short, sharp war against a uniformed army, with a bout of peacekeeping afterward. Now there was no peace to keep. In response, American officers ordered their soldiers to bring Iraq back under control. They urged their men to go after the enemy , and they authorized a range of aggressive tactics. On a visit form headquarters in Tikrit, Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, ordered Sassaman and other officers simply to ‘‘increase lethality”. Sassaman, adored by Odierno for the zeal with which his men hunted down guerrillas, took the order to heart. He sent his men into the Sunni villages around Balad to kick down doors and detain their angry young men. When Sassaman spoke of sending his soldiers into Sammara, his eyes gleamed. “We are going to inflict extreme violence,” he said.

Sassaman had taken command of the Fourth Infantry Division’s 1-8 Battalion in June, and although, like most American officers, he had received virtually no training in building a new nation or conducting a guerilla war, he had quickly figured out what he needed to do: remake the area’s shattered institutions, jump-start the economy and implant a democracy, all while battling an insurgency that was growing more powerful by the day. “It’s like Jekyll and Hyde out here,” Sassaman said at the time. “By day, we’re putting on a happy face. By night, we are hunting down and killing our enemies.”

When it came to nation-building or waging a counterinsurgency campaign, Sassaman was basically winging it. For starters, his men were spread incredibly thin. With roughly 800 soldiers, his battalion was responsible for nearly 300 square miles. There were Sunnis and Shiites, cities and farms, Sufis and Salafis. There were villages like Abu Hishma, that sheltered die-hard supporters of Hussein, and cities like Balad, where the survivors of Hussein’s regime wandered about as if just unstrapped from the torturer’s table, which some of them were.

There were no Army manuals on how to set up a local government in a country ruined by 30 years of terror ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQOEhXb6jlU ) , no maps for reading the expressions on the face of a Sunni sheik, no advice on handling the city engineer who was taking bribes to dole out electricity. “For a whole year,” Sassaman told me, “I was the warrior king.”

American money for public-works projects, so critical in showing good will and putting young men to work, came in bursts and then dried up. Projects began; projects stalled; Lt. Col. Laura Loftus, who commanded a combat engineer battalion in Dujail, a city just south of Sassaman’s area, recalled that when she arrived in July 2003, she found herself responsible for a city of 75,00 people in a state of complete physical and psychological collapse. Dujail was receiving four hours of electricity every third day, and half the town had no drinking water. Sewage drained through the streets. Thousands of Dujail’s people had been murdered or tortured by Hussein’s men. “It was a good thing I paid attention in high-school civics,” she told me. “There was no playbook.”

Over time, Sassaman found that virtually every aspect of his patch of Iraq had that yin-yang quality. Where the Shiites appreciated American efforts to quell the violence, Sunnis saw them as acts of war. While self-government took hold in Balad, in the Sunni areas there was cold apathy. In Abu Hishma, a Sunni village of about 7,000 the Americans were met with stares and obscene gestures; even the adults would run their fingers across their necks as the soldiers drove by. Slogans on the walls exhorted Iraqis to kill Americans. Crowds of young men would gather to throw rocks at American patrols. And then there were the armed attacks.

Sassaman directed most of his reconstruction money, nearly $4 million, to the Shiite areas for the simple reason that his men did not come under attack there. When the Americans entered Abu Jishma, it was seldom to build schools or roads; it was to patrol for insurgents and kick down doors.

I accompanied Sassaman and his men on one search through a Sunni village in October 2003, and I was able to witness the dynamic on my own. The searches seemed absolutely necessary, given the violence, but they seemed to be draining whatever good will the Sunnis had left for the Americans. In one dawn raid, soldiers from the 1-8 Battalion surrounded a house, kicked open its doors and stormed inside. They rousted 11 men from their beds, pulled them outside and forced them to squat on their haunches. Still inside, in the living room, a young woman stood with three small girls, probably her daughters, each with her hands high in the air. The Americans found no weapons. The Iraqi men squatted outside for half an hour. “I feel bad for these people, I really do,” Sgt. Eric Brown said that morning. “Its’ so hard to separate the good from the bad.”

On the night of Nov. 17, as one of the battalion’s patrols moved past Abu Hishma, a crowd of young Iraqis began taunting them. Seconds later, a team of insurgents fired a volley of rocket-propelled grenades directly at one of the Bradleys. One rocket-propelled grenade, or R.P.G., sailed directly into the chest of the driver, Staff Sgt. Dale Panchot. It nearly cut him in half.

The death of Panchot seemed to change everything for the battalion. Sassaman decided that the Sunni sheiks had broken the truce and that from that moment there would be no more deals. Building a democracy in places like Abu Hishma would have to take a back seat. The new priority would be killing insurgents and punishing anyone who supported them, even people who didn’t.

The day after Panchot was killed, Sassaman ordered his men to wrap Abu Hishma in barbed wire. American soldiers issued ID cards to all the men in the village between the ages of 17 and 65, and the soldiers put up checkpoints at the entrance to the town. Around the camp were signs threatening to shoot anyone who tried to enter or leave the town except in the approved way. The ID cards were in English only. “If you have one of these cards, you can come and go,” Sassaman said, standing at the gate of the village as the Iraqis filed past. “If you don’t have one of these cards, you can’t.”

As a measure intended to persuade the Iraqis to cooperate, wrapping Abu Hishma in barbed wire was a disaster. As they lined up at the checkpoints, the Iraqis compared themselves with Palestinians, who are sometimes forced to undergo the same sort of security checks and whose humiliations are shown relentlessly on television screens across the Arab world. “It’s just like a prison now,” said Hajji Tamir Rabia, an old man in the village. “The Americans do night raids, come into our houses when the women are sleeping. We can’t fight them. We don’t have any weapons.” After Abu Hishma was wrapped in barbed wire, the attacks against the Americans dropped off, bit it was a victory bought at no small price. Much of the village felt humiliated and angry, hardly the conditions for future success. Sassaman’s reputation was sealed, as I discovered when I slipped past the guards and into the town. “When mothers put their children to bed at night, they tell them, ‘If you aren’t a good boy, colonel Sassaman is going to come and get you,’“ and old man in the village said.

After a time, the insurgents came to fear him more than they did the others. When Sassaman left Balad, the attacks would increase; when he returned, they would fall away. Once, when Sassaman was returning from a mission in Samarra, insurgents fired a single mortar round into his compound, as if to welcome him back. He responded by firing 28 155-millimeter artillery shells and 42 mortar rounds. He called in two airstrikes, one with a 500 pound bomb and the other with a 2,000 pound bomb. Later on, his men found a crater as deep as a swimming pool.

Yet the experience in Abu Hishma and the other Sunni towns posed a basic challenge for Sassaman’s men: apart from killing insurgents, how could the Americans ensure that their authority would be respected and that they would be obeyed in a place where they were so thoroughly hated.

The tactics employed by Sassaman’s men had been explicitly ordered or at least condoned by senior American officers, and many units in the Sunni Triangle were already using the same kind of tough-guy methods. The order to wrap Abu Jishma in barbed wire, for instance, was given by Col. Frederick Rudesheim, Sassaman’s immediate supervisor. Odierno signed off on the wrapping of Saddam Hussein’s birthplace, Awja. Destroying homes and detaining people as quasi hostages—those, too, were being condoned by American generals. At a news conference in November 2003, Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq, acknowledged that he had authorized the destruction of homes thought to be used by insurgents.

The tough tactics employed by Sassaman’s battalion had their effect. Attacks in the Sunni villages like Abu Hishma, wrapped in barbed wire, dropped sharply. And his men succeeded in retaking Samara. Winning the long-term allegiance of the Iraqis in those areas was another matter, however. If many Iraqis in the Sunni Triangle were ever open to the American project—the Shiite cities like Balad excepted—very few of them are anymore. Majool Saadi Muhammad, 49, a tribal leader in Abu Hishma, said that he had harbored no strong feelings about the Americans when they arrived in April 2003 and was proud to have three sons serving in the new American-backed Iraqi Army. Then the raids began, and many of Abu Hishma’s young men were led away in hoods and cuffs. In early 2004, he said Sassaman led a raid on his house, kicking in the doors and leaving the place a shambles. “There is no explanation except to humiliate,” Muhammad told me. “I really hate them.”

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Here is the first intermission. Grab a snack…Act Two is about to begin...
Act Two: Counting the Dead

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The Department of Defense has identified 2,747 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. That is American Serviceman only. What about the Iraqi’s?

In the Prologue of this blog entry I pointed to Episode 300 on This American Life:

“What’s in a Number?”
This American Life

“Truth, Damn Truth, and Statistics. About two years ago, a John Hopkins University study in the British medical journal The Lancet estimated the number of civilian casualties in Iraq. It came up with a number – 100,000 dead – that was higher than any other estimate, and was mostly ignored. Producer Alex Blumberg tells the remarkable story of what it took to find that number, why we should find it credible and why almost no one believed it.”

That report was made two years ago. Take a listen to hear how they counted the dead and why it is a credible number. Last week they published a new report, by the same people at John’s Hopkins and the Lancet, and the report shows a spike in the number who have died.

600,000 dead in Iraq.

The Times October 11, 2006

War and turmoil has cost 600,000 Iraqi lives, study finds
By Sam Knight, and James Hider in Baghdad

A new study by public health researchers estimates that up to 600,000 Iraqi people — nearly 1 in 40 — have died violently since the American-led invasion of the country in March 2003.

The estimate, which far exceeds figures compiled by the United Nations and the Iraqi Government, is the second made by a group of American and Italian researchers and used a sampling of nearly 2,000 households across Iraq to extrapolate a total number of violent deaths, be they caused by crime, the US-led coalition or sectarian strife.

The first report, issued in October 2004 by a team led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, estimated that 100,000 people had been killed in the first year of the war. The study was criticized for its narrow sample and wide margin of error.

The new study, published in the online edition of The Lancet, the British medical journal, also accepts a broad range of error, with its lead author, Gilbert Burnham, also of Johns Hopkins, saying the true figure could lie anywhere between 426,369 to 793,663.

It estimated that a total of 654,965 more Iraqis had died as a consequence of the war than “would have been expected in a non-conflict situation”. Of those, 601,000 it was said had died directly of violent causes, including gunfire, car bombs, air strikes and other explosions. The rest had suffered from a general decline in healthcare and sanitary standards due to failing water supplies, sewerage and electricity supply.

The survey drew swift and senior rebuttals. When asked about the study at a White House news conference, President George Bush said: “The methodology is pretty well discredited.”

He added: “I do know that a lot of innocent people have died and that troubles me, and it grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence.”

The researchers defended their methods, which replicate those used to estimate the death toll in humanitarian emergencies such as Darfur, claiming that studying the mortality rate of a sample of families across Iraq is at least as accurate as relying on casualty figures issued by morgues, hospitals and the Iraqi Government.

According to a report in today’s New York Times, the researchers maintain that their study reflects the larger breakdown of order across Iraq and reflects the turbulence outside Baghdad, which dominates press and official reports about the progress of the war.

“We found deaths all over the country,” Dr Burnham told the newspaper, adding that Baghdad was an area of medium violence compared to the provinces of Diyala and Salahuddin, north of the capital, and Anbar to the west, which all had higher death rates.

The study found that up to 15,000 people are dying violently every month in Iraq, a level that surpasses by far the most recent UN estimates.

Last month the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq said that 3,009 civilians had died violently in August, down from 3,590 in July, two of the worst months of the war so far. More than 5,000 of the deaths were reported in Baghdad.

The US military does not keep an official count of the civilian casualties in Iraq, but according to its latest report to Congress, around 120 Iraqis, including police officers and soldiers, died every day in August, a total of 3,600, up from 26 a day, or 800 per month, in 2004. The John Hopkins figures also tower over the running totals maintained by the Iraq Body Count, an independent group that monitors media reports to estimate the numbers of Iraqi dead. The group’s current total stands at 48,000.

The Iraqi Government, meanwhile, has sought to take control of the compilation of mortality statistics. Baghdad’s central morgue, until now the main source of information for violence in the capital, was prohibited from issuing its own information last month.

Today, Adel Mohsin, the Iraqi Deputy Health Minister, cast doubt on the estimate, saying: “I think it’s a bit exaggerated... I’d say we are now averaging about 2,000 to 3,000 maximum a month killed, which would be 36,000 a year.”

Mr Mohsin did say that 50,000 Iraqis could have lost their lives because of the parlous state of the country’s hospitals and infrastructure: “Obviously if we compare the standard of treatment to countries like the UK, we have lost a lot of people,” he said.

The authors of the Johns Hopkins study chose 1,849 families from 47 districts across Iraq — chosen for their geographical location and population size, rather than level of violence — and found that the death rate among the 12,801 people they studied was 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people since the war began. That rate compared to an estimate of 5.5 per 1,000 under Saddam.

The researchers found that gunfire caused 56 per cent of the deaths directly attributable to violence, with air strikes and car bombs accounting for a further 13 to 14 per cent.

Commenting on the results, Dr Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, said: “The disaster that is the West’s current strategy in Iraq must be used as a constructive call to the international community to reconfigure its foreign policy around human security rather than national security, around health and well-being in addition to the protection of territorial boundaries and economic stability.”

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…we have come to the third act...
Act Three: Army Major General John R.S. Batiste (retired)

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USA: Maj. General John Batiste’s testimony before Sen. Democratic Policy Committee

September 25, 2006

My name is John Batiste. I left the military on principle on November 1, 2005, after more than 31 years of service. I walked away from promotion and a promising future serving our country. I hung up my uniform because I came to the gut-wrenching realization that I could do more good for my soldiers and their families out of uniform. I am a West Point graduate, the son and son-in-law of veteran career soldiers, a two-time combat veteran with extensive service in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, and a life-long Republican.

Bottom line, our nation is in peril, our Department of Defense’s leadership is extraordinarily bad, and our Congress is only today, more than five years into this war, beginning to exercise its oversight responsibilities. This is all about accountability and setting our nation on the path to victory. There is no substitute for victory and I believe we must complete what we started in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Donald Rumsfeld is not a competent wartime leader. He knows everything, except “how to win.” He surrounds himself with like-minded and compliant subordinates who do not grasp the importance of the principles of war, the complexities of Iraq, or the human dimension of warfare. Secretary Rumsfeld ignored 12 years of U.S. Central Command deliberate planning and strategy, dismissed honest dissent, and browbeat subordinates to build “his plan,” which did not address the hard work to crush the insurgency, secure a post-Saddam Iraq, build the peace, and set Iraq up for self-reliance. He refused to acknowledge and even ignored the potential for the insurgency, which was an absolute certainty.

Bottom line, his plan allowed the insurgency to take root and metastasize to where it is today. Our great military lost a critical window of opportunity to secure Iraq because of inadequate troop levels and capability required to impose security, crush a budding insurgency, and set the conditions for the rule of law in Iraq. We were undermanned from the beginning, lost an early opportunity to secure the country, and have yet to regain the initiative.

To compensate for the shortage of troops, commanders are routinely forced to manage shortages and shift coalition and Iraqi security forces from one contentious area to another in places like Baghdad, An Najaf, Tal Afar, Samarra, Ramadi, Fallujah, and many others. This shifting of forces is generally successful in the short term, but the minute a mission is complete and troops are redeployed back to the region where they came from, insurgents reoccupy the vacuum and the cycle repeats itself. Troops returning to familiar territory find themselves fighting to reoccupy ground which was once secure. We are all witnessing this in Baghdad and the Al Anbar Province today. I am reminded of the myth of Sisyphus. This is no way to fight a counter-insurgency. Secretary Rumsfeld’s plan did not set our military up for success.

Secretary Rumsfeld’s dismal strategic decisions resulted in the unnecessary deaths of American servicemen and women, our allies, and the good people of Iraq. He was responsible for America and her allies going to war with the wrong plan and a strategy that did not address the realities of fighting an insurgency. He violated fundamental principles of war, dismissed deliberate military planning, ignored the hard work to build the peace after the fall of Saddam Hussein, set the conditions for Abu Ghraib and other atrocities that further ignited the insurgency, disbanded Iraqi security force institutions when we needed them most, constrained our commanders with an overly restrictive de-Ba’athification policy, and failed to seriously resource the training and equipping of the Iraqi security forces as our main effort.

He does not comprehend the human dimension of warfare. 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. You cannot do this with precision bombs from 30,000 feet. 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.

Secretary Rumsfeld built his team by systematically removing dissension. America went to war with “his plan” and to say that he listens to his generals is disingenuous. We are fighting with his strategy. He reduced force levels to unacceptable levels, micromanaged the war, and caused delays in the approval of troop requirements and the deployment process, which tied the hands of commanders while our troops were in contact with the enemy. At critical junctures, commanders were forced to focus on managing shortages rather than leading, planning, and anticipating opportunity.

Through all of this, our Congressional oversight committees were all but silent and not asking the tough questions, as was done routinely during both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. Our Congress shares responsibility for what is and is not happening in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Our nation’s treasure in blood and dollars continues to be squandered under Secretary Rumsfeld’s leadership. Losing one American life due to incompetent war planning and preparation is absolutely unacceptable. The work to remove Saddam Hussein and his regime was a challenge, but it pales in comparison to the hard work required to build the peace. The detailed deliberate planning to finish the job in Iraq was not considered as Secretary Rumsfeld forbade military planners from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq. At one point, he threatened to fire the next person who talked about the need for a post-war plan. Our country and incredible military were not set up for success.

Our country has yet to mobilize for a protracted, long war. I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the Administration did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq. Secretary Rumsfeld failed to address the full range of requirements for this effort, and the result is one percent of the population shouldering the burdens, continued hemorrhaging of our national treasure in terms of blood and dollars, an Army and Marine Corps that will require tens of billions of dollars to reset after we withdraw from Iraq, the majority of our National Guard brigades no longer combat-ready, a Veterans Administration which is underfunded by over $3 billion, and America arguably less safe now than it was on September 11, 2001. If we had seriously laid out and considered the full range of requirements for the war in Iraq, we would likely have taken a different course of action that would have maintained a clear focus on our main effort in Afghanistan, not fueled Islamic fundamentalism across the globe, and not created more enemies than there were insurgents.

What do we do now? We are where we are, plagued by the mistakes of the past. Thankfully, we are Americans and with the right leadership, we can do anything.

First, the American people need to take charge through their elected officials. Secretary Rumsfeld and the Administration are fighting a war in secret that threatens our democratic values. This needs to stop right now, today.

Second, we must replace Secretary Rumsfeld and his entire inner circle. We deserve leaders whose judgment and instinct we can all trust.

Third, we must mobilize our country for a protracted challenge, which must include conveying the “what, why, and how long” to every American, rationing to finance the totality of what we are doing, and gearing up our industrial base in a serious manner. Mortgaging our future at the rate of $1.5 billion a week and financing our great Army and Marine Corps with supplemental legislation must stop. Americans will rally behind this important cause when the rationale is properly laid out.

Fourth, we must rethink our Iraq strategy. “More of the same” is not a strategy, nor is it working. This new strategy must include serious consideration of federalizing the country, other forms of Iraqi national conscription and incentives to modify behavior, and a clear focus on training and equipping the Iraqi security forces as “America’s main effort.”

Fifth, we must fix our inter-agency process to completely engage and synchronize all elements of America’s national power. Unity of effort is fundamental and we need one person in charge in Iraq who pulls the levers with all U.S. Government agencies responding with 110 percent effort.

Finally, we need to get serious about mending our relationships with allies and getting closer to our friends and enemies. America can not go this alone. All of this is possible, but we need leadership and responsible Congressional oversight to pull this off.

I challenge the American people to get informed and speak out. Remember that the Congress represents and works for the people. Congressional oversight committees have been strangely silent for too long, and our elected officials must step up to their responsibilities or be replaced. This is not about partisan politics, but rather what is good for our country.

Our November elections are crucial. Every American needs to understand the issues and cast his or her vote. I believe that one needs to vote for the candidate who understands the issues and who has the moral courage to do the harder right rather than the easier wrong. I for one will continue to speak out until there is accountability, until the American people establish momentum, and until our Congressional oversight committees kick into action. Victory in Iraq is fundamental and we cannot move forward until accountability is achieved. Thank you.