5 years later, no regrets

[thedrifter]

5 years later, no regrets <br />
Now, Anthony Lewis, who served in Iraq at the start, fears we're becoming complacent. <br />
By JEFF FRANTZ <br />
<br />
Daily Record/Sunday News <br />
By JEFF FRANTZ <br />
Article Last Updated:...

[thedrifter]

5 years after Saddam's fall, Iraq still yearning for stability
By John F. Burns
Sunday, March 16, 2008

LONDON: Five years on, it seems positively surreal.

On the evening of March 19, 2003, a small group of Western journalists had grandstand seats for the big event in Baghdad, the start of the full-scale American bombing of strategic targets in the Iraqi capital. We had forced a way through a bolted door at the top of an emergency staircase leading to the 21st-story roof of the Palestine Hotel, with a panoramic view of Saddam Hussein's command complex across the Tigris River.

The bombing had been jump-started 16 hours earlier, when President George W. Bush ordered two B-1 bombers to attack the Dora Farms complex in south-central Baghdad in a dawn raid intended to kill Saddam and end the war before it began. That caught everyone by surprise, including Saddam, who somehow survived. But by nightfall, the city was braced.

The BBC reported B-52 bombers were taking off from a base in England in early afternoon, and we knew, from the flying time, that zero hour for Baghdad would be about 9 p.m.

At precisely that moment - not a few seconds early, nor late - the first cruise missile struck the vast, bunkerlike presidential command complex in what would become, under the U.S. occupation, the Green Zone. For 40 minutes, followed by a break, and then another 40 minutes, a fusillade of missiles and bombs struck palaces, military complexes, intelligence buildings, the heart of Saddam's years of murderous tyranny. In Washington, they called it "shock and awe." In Baghdad, Iraqis yearning for their liberation from Saddam called it, simply, "the air show."

On that hotel roof were experienced Western foreign correspondents, men and women for whom impartiality was their coda. We feared the bombing would remove the last reason for the secret police to spare us, since our Iraqi "fixers" had warned us that the only thing protecting us in those final days was the regime's concern that harming Western reporters would speed the course to war. Demonstrating our impartiality, once the first missiles struck, thus assumed an intensely personal, as well as professional, dimension - the measure, perhaps, of whether we would survive the time it took for Saddam's regime to finally collapse.

But from that first impact, among many on the roof, the mood was scarcely one of cool detachment, or at least not as cautioned as it might have been by the longer-term implications of what we were seeing. Part of it, no doubt, was the air show - the sheer, astonishing, overwhelming demonstration of power, more like an act of God than man, unleashing in those watching from the roof something approaching awe.

But the larger part, the one that seems surreal now in the light of all that has followed, was the sense that, with the beginning of the end of Saddam Hussein's evil, the suffering of millions of ordinary Iraqis that we had chronicled, and pitied, was ending.

As they must have to many Americans watching the live television coverage, those missiles and bombs seemed, in the headiness of that moment, to be fit retribution for a ruthless dictator and the medieval wretchedness he had visited on Iraq's people. That it took such force to accomplish seemed mitigated, at least somewhat, by the precision of the strikes, with only isolated instances, during the 19 days before U.S. troops reached Baghdad, of errant missiles killing innocent civilians.

Early one morning, I went to the smoking wreckage of the city's central telephone exchange, only to find patients from Iraq's main heart hospital, 45 meters, or 150 feet, away, across a narrow lane, uninjured, out in the garden in their pajamas watching the commotion.

It was not long, of course, before events in Iraq began giving everybody cause to reconsider. On April 9, the day the Marines entered Baghdad and used one of their tanks to help the crowd haul down Saddam's statue in Firdos Square, U.S. troops stood by while mobs began looting, ravaging palaces and torture centers, along with ministries, museums and hospitals. Late in the day, at the Oil Ministry, I discovered it was the only building that Marines had orders to protect. Turning to Jon Lee Anderson, a correspondent for The New Yorker who had been my companion that day, I saw shock mirrored in his face. "Say it ain't so," I said. But it was.

Looking back, it has been fashionable to say the Americans began losing the war right then. At the least, it was the first misstep in what quickly became a long chronicle: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the primary cause the Bush administration had given for the war; the absence of a plan, at least any the Pentagon intended to implement, for the period after Baghdad fell; the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, and thus casting aside the help it might have given in fighting the insurgency that began flickering within 10 days of U.S. troops entering Baghdad; and the lack of an effective American counterinsurgency strategy, at least until the troop increase last year finally began bringing the war's toll down.

Beyond these, there were the instances when America's intentions were betrayed by its troops in more personal ways, with the abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, with the shooting deaths of 24 civilians in Haditha and with the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl at Mahmudiya, along with the killing of three other members of her family, all leading to court-martial hearings that tore at the heart of anyone who starts from a position of admiration for the U.S. armed forces. The Marine offensive that recaptured Falluja from Islamic militants in November 2004, virtually flattening the city without achieving more than a temporary change in the arc of the war, may also draw its share of condemnation.

At the fifth anniversary, the conflict's staggering burden is a rebuke to any who hoped Saddam's removal might be accomplished at an acceptable cost. Back in 2003, only the most prescient could have guessed that the current "surge" would raise the U.S. troop commitment above 160,000, the highest level since the invasion, in the war's fifth year, or that the toll would include tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, as well nearly 4,000 U.S. troops; or that America's financial costs, by some recent estimates, would rise above $650 billion by 2008, on their way to perhaps $2 trillion if the commitment continues for another five years.

Beyond that, there are a million or more Iraqis living as refugees in neighboring Arab countries, and the pitiful toll of fear and deprivation on Iraqi streets.

Those of us who witnessed the war at firsthand have more personal reckonings. These pressed home, for me, on countless occasions during the years since the invasion, up to my departure from Baghdad late last summer, when I completed a five-year assignment in Iraq and moved to a new posting in London.

Worst of all were the moments when war and its arguments were reduced from the remote, and political, to the intensely personal, and to that terrible sense, familiar to anybody who has experienced war, that nothing, or almost nothing, can justify its wounds.

They are scenes that do not fade: Watching American soldiers being slipped into body bags for the journey home, and knowing, at that instant, that the lives of unknowing families thousands of miles away have been shattered; surveying the aftermath of suicide bombings, with severed limbs in the street, and hearing the wailing of the Iraqi bereaved.

In time, those who started the war will answer in history, as much as they will claim the credit if America ultimately finds a way home with honor, and without destroying all it went to Iraq to achieve. But reporters, too, may wish to make an accounting. If we accurately depicted the horrors of Saddam's Iraq in the run-up to the war, with its charnel houses and mass graves, we have to acknowledge that we were less effective, then, in probing beneath the carapace of terror to uncover other facets of Iraq's culture and history that would have a determining impact on the American project to build a Western-style democracy, or at least the basics of a civil society.

It was not easy, with a reporter's every move scrutinized by Saddam's lugubrious minders, to undertake that kind of in-depth reporting. But from the exhaustive reporting in the years since, Americans now know how deeply traumatized Iraqis were by the brutality of Saddam, and how deep was the poison of fear and distrust. They also know, in detail, through the protracted trials of Saddam and his senior henchmen, of the inner workings of the merciless machinery that transported victims to the torture chambers and mass graves.

They know, too, through coverage in The New York Times and other newspapers, of the deep fissures of ethnicity, sect and tribe, which were camouflaged by the quarter-century of Saddam's totalitarian rule.

As much as America's policy failures, it has been these factors that have contributed to the Iraqi quagmire. Properly weighed, in time, they might have given cause for second thoughts about the wisdom of the invasion. What seems certain is that those entrusted with the task of fulfilling the U.S. mission were confronted, from the beginning, by an odds-against calculus. Iraq, in 2003, could scarcely have been less prepared than it was to embrace democracy, dependent as that is, everywhere, on a minimum of popular consent and trust.

The harsh reality is that many Iraqis, at least by the time of the two elections held in 2005, had little zest for democracy, at least as Westerners understand it. This, too, was not fully understood at the time. To walk Baghdad's streets on the voting days, especially during the December election that produced the Shiite-led government now in power, was inspiring. With 12 million people casting ballots, a turnout of about 75 percent, it was natural enough for Bush to say that Iraqis had embraced the American vision.

In truth, what the majority produced was less a vote for democracy than a vote for a once-and-for-all, permanent transfer of power, from the Sunni minority that ruled in Iraq for centuries, to an impatient, and deeply wounded, if not outright vengeful, Shiite majority.

What has followed has been predictable. For close to two years, the Shiite religious parties that won the December 2005 election have clung tenaciously to their newfound power, and the Sunni parties, mostly unreconciled to an Iraq ruled by Shiites, have maneuvered in ways intended to keep open the possibility, ultimately, of a Sunni restoration. Nothing, in short, has been settled. U.S. officials bridle at the failure to tackle decisively any of the issues they identified as crucial to "reconciliation," including the critical issue of the future sharing of oil revenues.

Meanwhile, the rival Iraqi blocs, taking the long view, look beyond the U.S. occupation to a time when these central issues of power will be settled among themselves.

American hopes are that Iraqis, with enough American troops still present to stiffen the new Iraqi forces and prevent a slide backward toward all-out civil war, will ultimately tire of the violence in the way of other peoples who have been plunged into communal violence, as many Lebanese did during their 15-year civil war. Those hopes have been buoyed by a reduction in violence in the last year that can be traced to the U.S. troop increase and to the cooperation or quiescence of some previously militant groups, both Sunni and Shiite.

They are hopes shared by many ordinary Iraqis. Opinion polls, including those commissioned by the U.S. command, have long suggested that a majority of Iraqis would like U.S. troops withdrawn, but another lesson to be drawn from Saddam's years is that any attempt to measure opinion in Iraq is fatally skewed by intimidation. More often than not, people tell pollsters and reporters what they think is safe, not necessarily what they believe. My own experience, invariably, was that Iraqis I met who felt secure enough to speak with candor had an overwhelming desire to see American troops remain long enough to restore stability.

That sentiment is not one that many critics of the war in the United States seem willing to accept, but neither does it offer the glimmer of cheer that it might seem to offer to many supporters of the war. For it would be strange, after the years of unrelenting bloodshed, if Iraqis demanded anything else. It is small credit to the invasion, after all it has cost, that Iraqis should arrive at a point when all they want from America is a return to something that they had under Saddam, stability. For America, too, it is a deeply dispiriting prospect, promising no early end to the bleeding in Iraq.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

March 16, 2008
War Torn
Five Years
By JOHN F. BURNS

LONDON

FIVE years on, it seems positively surreal.

On the evening of March 19, 2003, a small group of Western journalists had grandstand seats for the big event in Baghdad, the start of the full-scale American bombing of strategic targets in the Iraqi capital. We had forced a way through a bolted door at the top of an emergency staircase leading to the 21st-story roof of the Palestine Hotel, with a panoramic view of Saddam Hussein’s command complex across the Tigris River.

The bombing had been jump-started 16 hours earlier, when President Bush ordered two B-1 bombers to attack the Dora Farms complex in south-central Baghdad in a dawn raid intended to kill Mr. Hussein and end the war before it began. That caught everyone by surprise, including Saddam, who somehow survived. But by nightfall, the city was braced. The BBC reported B-52 bombers were taking off from a base in England in early afternoon, and we knew, from the flying time, that zero hour for Baghdad would be about 9 p.m.

At precisely that moment — not a few seconds early, nor late — the first cruise missile struck the vast, bunker-like presidential command complex in what would become, under the American occupation, the Green Zone. For 40 minutes, followed by a break, and then another 40 minutes, a fusillade of missiles and bombs struck palaces, military complexes, intelligence buildings, the heart of Saddam Hussein’s years of murderous tyranny. In Washington, they called it “shock and awe.” In Baghdad, Iraqis yearning for their liberation from Saddam called it, simply, “the air show.”

On that hotel roof were experienced Western foreign correspondents, men and women for whom impartiality was their coda. We feared the bombing would remove the last reason for the secret police to spare us, since our Iraqi “fixers” had warned us that the only thing protecting us in those final days was the regime’s concern that harming Western reporters would speed the course to war. Demonstrating our impartiality, once the first missiles struck, thus assumed an intensely personal, as well as professional, dimension — the measure, perhaps, of whether we would survive the time it took for Saddam’s regime to finally collapse.

But from that first impact, among many on the roof, the mood was scarcely one of cool detachment, or at least not as cautioned as it might have been by the longer-term implications of what we were seeing. Part of it, no doubt, was the air show — the sheer, astonishing, overwhelming demonstration of power, more like an act of God than man, unleashing in those watching from the roof something approaching awe. But the larger part, the one that seems surreal now in the light of all that has followed, was the sense that, with the beginning of the end of Saddam Hussein’s evil, the suffering of millions of ordinary Iraqis that we had chronicled, and pitied, was ending.

As they must have to many Americans watching the live television coverage, those missiles and bombs seemed, in the headiness of that moment, to be fit retribution for a ruthless dictator, and the medieval wretchedness he had visited on Iraq’s people. That it took such force to accomplish seemed mitigated, at least somewhat, by the precision of the strikes, with only isolated instances, during the 19 days before American troops reached Baghdad, of errant missiles killing innocent civilians. Early one morning, I went to the smoking wreckage of the city’s central telephone exchange, only to find patients from Iraq’s main heart hospital, 150 feet away, across a narrow lane, uninjured, out in the garden in their pajamas watching the commotion.

It was not long, of course, before events in Iraq began giving everybody cause to reconsider. On April 9, the day the Marines entered Baghdad and used one of their tanks to help the crowd haul down Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square, American troops stood by while mobs began looting, ravaging palaces and torture centers, along with ministries, museums and hospitals. Late in the day, at the oil ministry, I discovered it was the only building marines had orders to protect. Turning to Jon Lee Anderson, a correspondent for The New Yorker who had been my companion that day, I saw shock mirrored in his face. “Say it ain’t so,” I said. But it was.

Looking back, it has been fashionable to say the Americans began losing the war right then. At the least, it was the first misstep in what quickly became a long chronicle: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the primary cause the Bush Administration had given for the war; the absence of a plan, at least any the Pentagon intended to implement, for the period after Baghdad fell; the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, and thus casting aside the help it might have given in fighting the insurgency that began flickering within 10 days of American troops entering Baghdad; the lack of an effective American counterinsurgency strategy, at least until the troop increase last year finally began bringing the war’s toll down.

Beyond these, there were the instances when America’s intentions were betrayed by its troops in more personal ways, with the abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, with the shooting deaths of 24 civilians in Haditha and with the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl at Mahmudiya, along with the killing of three other members of her family, all leading to court-martial hearings that tore at the heart of anyone who starts from a position of admiration for the American armed forces. The Marine offensive that recaptured Falluja from Islamic militants in November 2004, virtually flattening the city without achieving more than a temporary change in the arc of the war, may also draw its share of condemnation.

At the fifth anniversary, the conflict’s staggering burden is a rebuke to any who hoped Mr. Hussein’s removal might be accomplished at acceptable cost. Back in 2003, only the most prescient could have guessed that the current “surge” would raise the American troop commitment above 160,000, the highest level since the invasion, in the war’s fifth year, or that the toll would include tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, as well nearly 4,000 American troops; or that America’s financial costs, by some recent estimates, would rise above $650 billion by 2008, on their way to perhaps $2 trillion if the commitment continues for another five years. Beyond that, there are a million or more Iraqis living as refugees in neighboring Arab countries, and the pitiful toll of fear and deprivation on Iraqi streets.

Those of us who witnessed the war at first hand have more personal reckonings. These pressed home, for me, on countless occasions during the years since the invasion, up to my departure from Baghdad late last summer, when I completed a five-year assignment in Iraq and moved to a new posting in London. Worst of all were the moments when war and its arguments were reduced from the remote, and political, to the intensely personal, and to that terrible sense, familiar to anybody who has experienced war, that nothing, or almost nothing, can justify its wounds.

They are scenes that do not fade: Watching American soldiers being slipped into body bags for the journey home, and knowing, at that instant, that the lives of unknowing families thousands of miles away have been shattered; surveying the aftermath of suicide bombings, with severed limbs in the street, and hearing the wailing of the Iraqi bereaved. Or, an experience we endured twice at The New York Times, having a young Iraqi man working on our news staff gunned down by militiamen and insurgents, leaving children, some barely old enough to be in school, to cope with life without a beloved father and a brother, and to have no sense of why.

In time, those who launched the war will answer in history, as much as they will claim the credit if America ultimately finds a way home with honor, and without destroying all it went to Iraq to achieve. But reporters, too, may wish to make an accounting. If we accurately depicted the horrors of Saddam’s Iraq in the run-up to the war, with its charnel houses and mass graves, we have to acknowledge that we were less effective, then, in probing beneath the carapace of terror to uncover other facets of Iraq’s culture and history that would have a determining impact on the American project to build a Western-style democracy, or at least the basics of a civil society.

It was not easy, with a reporter’s every move scrutinized by Saddam Hussein’s lugubrious minders, to undertake that kind of in-depth reporting. But from the exhaustive reporting in the years since, Americans now know how deeply traumatized Iraqis were by the brutality of Saddam, and how deep was the poison of fear and distrust. They also know, in detail, through the protracted trials of Mr. Hussein and his senior henchmen, of the inner workings of the merciless machinery that transported victims to the torture chambers and mass graves.

They know, too, through coverage in this newspaper and others, of the deep fissures, of ethnicity, sect and tribe, that were camouflaged by the quarter-century of Mr. Hussein’s totalitarian rule. As much as America’s policy failures, it has been these factors that have contributed to the Iraqi quagmire. Properly weighed, in time, they might have given cause for second thoughts about the wisdom of the invasion. What seems certain is that those entrusted with the task of fulfilling the American mission were confronted, from the beginning, by an odds-against calculus. Iraq, in 2003, could scarcely have been less prepared than it was to embrace democracy, dependent as that is, everywhere, on a minimum of popular consent and trust.

The harsh reality is that many Iraqis, at least by the time of the two elections held in 2005, had little zest for democracy, at least as Westerners understand it. This, too, was not fully understood at the time. To walk Baghdad’s streets on the voting days, especially during the December election that produced the Shiite-led government now in power, was inspiriting. With 12 million people casting ballots, a turnout of about 75 per cent, it was natural enough for President Bush to say Iraqis had embraced the American vision. In truth, what the majority produced was less a vote for democracy than a vote for a once-and-for-all, permanent transfer of power, from the Sunni minority that ruled in Iraq for centuries, to an impatient, and deeply wounded, if not outright vengeful, Shiite majority.

What has followed has been predictable. For close to two years, the Shiite religious parties that won the December 2005 election have clung tenaciously to their new-found power, and the Sunni parties, mostly unreconciled to an Iraq ruled by Shiites, have maneuvered in ways intended to keep open the possibility, ultimately, of a Sunni restoration. Nothing, in short, has been settled. Americans officials bridle at the failure to tackle decisively any of the issues they identified as crucial to “reconciliation,” including the critical issue of the future share of oil revenues. Meanwhile, the rival Iraqi blocs, taking the long view, look beyond the American occupation to a time when these central issues of power will be settled among themselves.

American hopes are that Iraqis, with enough American troops still present to stiffen the new Iraqi forces and prevent a slide backward toward all-out civil war, will ultimately tire of the violence in the way of other peoples who have been plunged into communal violence, as many Lebanese did during their 15-year civil war. Those hopes have been buoyed by a reduction in violence in the last year that can been traced to the American troop increase and to the cooperation or quiescence of some previously militant groups, both Sunni and Shiite.

They are hopes shared by many ordinary Iraqis. Opinion polls, including those commissioned by the American command, have long suggested that a majority of Iraqis would like American troops withdrawn, but another lesson to be drawn from Saddam Hussein’s years is that any attempt to measure opinion in Iraq is fatally skewed by intimidation. More often than not, people tell pollsters and reporters what they think is safe, not necessarily what they believe. My own experience, invariably, was that Iraqis I met who felt secure enough to speak with candor had an overwhelming desire to see American troops remain long enough to restore stability.

That sentiment is not one that many critics of the war in the United States seem willing to accept, but neither does it offer the glimmer of cheer that it might seem to offer to many supporters of the war. For it would be passing strange, after the years of unrelenting bloodshed, if Iraqis demanded anything else. It is small credit to the invasion, after all it has cost, that Iraqis should arrive at a point when all they want from America is a return to something, stability, that they had under Saddam. For America, too, it is a deeply dispiriting prospect, promising no early end to the bleeding in Iraq.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

FOCUS: 5 YEARS IN IRAQ
Five years of war in Iraq: Nearly 4,000 Americans give their lives as a democracy struggles to take hold
By Lou Michel
Updated: 03/16/08 9:17 AM


Five years ago this week, U.S. and coalition forces launched a missile attack against Baghdad.

It was supposed to be the start of a swift and decisive war to stop a ruthless dictator who was purported to be hoarding weapons of mass destruction.

On March 19, 2003, as air raid sirens blared across Baghdad, President Bush told an anxious nation: “We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.”

Just days earlier, Vice President Cheney assured Americans that “we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

Marine Steven A. Stunkle, a native of Porter, was among the first wave of troops to invade Iraq. His unit was right on the border between Iraq and Kuwait. He recalled lo oking through binoculars and seeing Iraqi soldiers looking back at him through theirs.

Those were the days of “shock and awe” and mesmerizing 24-hour coverage from journalists “embedded” with troops as they barreled through, almost effortlessly, to Iraq’s capital. It looked as though the war would be over in a matter of weeks.

But five years later, there still appears to be no end in sight.

Stunkle, like tens of thousands of other U.S. troops, served a second tour in Iraq. He has also earned a Purple Heart.

He has since left the Marines but continues to support the U.S.-led war. He said he would consider re-enlisting one day.

“Sometimes, I think I might want to go back into the military, and one day I might,” he said. “I enjoyed the camaraderie. It’s like a brotherhood.”

Since 2003, “shock and awe” has given way to a grim drumbeat of American troops killed in insurgent attacks, messy sectarian wars and incremental improvements in the lives of Iraqis.

As of Saturday, nearly 4,000 U.S. troops have died in Iraq. Almost 30,000 more have been wounded.

At least 48,000 Iraqis — almost 40,000 of them civilians — have died since the war began.

Scores of area men and women answered the call to arms.

The war took them to places geographically, physically and mentally they never could have imagined. At least 27 from the Buffalo area have lost their lives in Iraq. Others lost limbs. Many more returned home with memories and scars they’ll carry forever.

“I guess it’s hard for me to understand how anybody who has served overseas in combat would be able to come back and not be changed in some way,” said Army National Guard Capt. Roger Woodworth of Snyder. “I think we’re all different now, not better, not worse, just different.”

Woodworth, now 37, trains other soldiers who will be part of the next wave headed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

He strongly believes in the overall mission that freed Iraq from the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and now focuses on trying to make it a better place for its citizens.

Others can’t help but feel a sense of disappointment.

“I wish the war had meant more,” said David S. Caputi, of Grand Island, who barely survived a car bombing on May 8, 2005. “I wish everything we did over there, the time, the sweat, the blood, I wish it had developed into something more meaningful.

He continued: “With all that we did, all the projects, all the money that went over there, the place is worse than it was five years ago. When all is said and done, the only one really making out from this war is Halliburton,” Caputi said, adding that civilian contractors make much more money than soldiers who do the same dangerous jobs.

A poll by the Pew Research Center earlier this month showed Americans are now evenly split on how the war is progressing.

It’s a far cry from the positive outlook at the beginning of the war, but it also marks a significant upswing of optimism from one year ago, when the same pollsters found that 67 percent of the nation believed the war was progressing badly.

Sectarian violence

The beginning of the war was marked with images of triumph: from the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad to Bush flying onto an aircraft carrier emblazoned with a “Mission Accomplished” banner.

The heraldry soon faded. The much-touted stories of Pfc. Jessica Lynch going down fighting before being captured turned out to be mostly fiction. Even her “rescue” turned out to be a humdrum affair.

U.S. weapons inspectors came to the conclusion that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

Disturbing reports about stomach-turning abuses of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison by U.S. soldiers infuriated Americans and the world.

And most troubling of all was that sectarian violence began to explode across the country and insurgents began using guerrilla tactics against U.S. troops and contractors: crude bombs hidden in the roads, kidnappings and gruesome be-headings.

Nicholas F. Cerrone, a 22- year-old Army sergeant from Niagara County who served two tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan, says despite all of the low points in the war, America is making positive changes through the sacrifices of its military and the $12 billion a month now being spent on the war.

“I’m 100 percent proud of everything that I’ve done. I feel like I’ve made a difference,” said Cerrone, who was raised in Wilson and now is a ranger assigned to Fort Benning, Ga. “With the amount of money the U.S. has put in, it is making a difference. A lot of people over here may not see it, but we are making a difference.” Others differ.

“The first thing we need to understand is that this is the start of the sixth year of an occupation. We’ve heard from politicians and pundits, lobbyists and generals, but we don’t hear from the average soldier on the ground,” said Geoff Millard, a former Lockport resident who served in Iraq with the National Guard.

Now living in Washington, D.C., Millard heads a chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War and is involved in high-profile events to inform the public about the horrors of war.

The U.S. military death toll mounts as American officials continue “telling lies,” according to Millard, whose outspoken manner contrasts with other local veterans who quietly question whether it is right to stay in Iraq.

But one thing appears constant among the war veterans who offered their reflections on the fifth anniversary, which arrives Wednesday. All say their participation marked a pivotal point in each of their lives.

The intensity of war, they explained, will probably never be eclipsed by future events in their lives. Consider what they have experienced:

• Living for months at a time on high alert, “which will take a psychological toll on anyone,” according to Army Reservist Lt. Col. Terry McGuire of Williamsville, who served in Iraq helping reunite families who were dislocated.

• Searching for and disarming roadside bombs or trying to avoid them.

• Working with Iraqi civilians to rebuild their country’s infrastructure by teaching them how to go about protecting power plants and perform routine maintenance on the facilities.

It hasn’t been easy. Unlike other wars where the mission was very basic — search and destroy the enemy — the military finds itself multitasking as it helps to rebuild Iraq.

Honorable service

Ranking right at the top of what motivated many local residents to give up civilian life to be part of the military are patriotism and the chance to take the fight to terrorists.

“They’ll kill us just as soon as look at us. They don’t care about human rights,” said retired Marine Dana Cushing of Grand Island, who follows the war closely. “A couple weeks ago, they blew up two mentally disabled girls. It was their brother, a fundamental whack job, from what I was able to find out, who strapped them up with bombs and sent them into the marketplace and blew them up. That gets all the coverage, and you don’t see all the rest of country and how it’s doing fine.”

Many soldiers and pro-war politicians point to the free elections that were held in 2005 as proof that their sacrifices were worth making.

Few could deny the power of images of Iraqi men and women flocking to polls, casting votes freely, and emerging with purple-dyed fingers.

But others, like Millard, say the ugly side of the war continues to be overlooked.

A Buffalo native who was raised in Lockport where he joined the Army National Guard, Millard says he and fellow members of Iraq Veterans Against the War are trying to educate the public so that it can make informed decisions.

“We hear about building bridges and schools and handing out candy to Iraqi children, but let’s be clear about what we don’t hear. We don’t hear about traffic control point shootings. Very few Americans understand what the rules of engagement are in Iraq. These are the things we want to continue bringing to light,” Millard said.

With fierce disdain, he recalls a command meeting he was at in Iraq, serving as a secretary to a general.

“The general and his staff were being briefed on how an Iraqi family, two parents and two children, were killed at a traffic control point because they were thought to be suicide bombers.

“A full bird colonel turns to the entire division level staff at the meeting and says, ‘If these f . . . Hajjii’s [a derogatory term used for Iraqis] learned to drive, this s...wouldn’t happen.’ That really shocked me. I thought at least the brass would believe in the rhetoric of this whole thing. How can you bring freedom to a people if you don’t respect them enough even when they’re killed,” Millard said.

What troubled him the most, Millard says, is that the colonel appeared not to consider the psychological damage the soldier who shot the family would carry with him the rest of his life and “the fact that we killed an entire blood line that day.”

And yet Millard, like so many other veterans, says he takes pride in the fact that he went to war. “I am proud that I was willing to put my life on the line for this country,” he said. “But I’m upset because the war was based on lies and that service members continue to die based on more and more lies.”

Amputee supports war

Not everyone shares the same opinion. Among them is 44-year-old Army National Guard Lt. Frank E. Washburn, another Purple Heart recipient who was also raised in Lockport and now lives in Lancaster.

“I do feel the surge is working,” said Washburn, who lost half his left foot when attempting to disable an improvised explosive device.

The surge began in the months after the December 2006 recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which in contrast had set a goal of withdrawing combat troops by early 2008 in support of more aggressive diplomacy.

Supporters of the surge won the debate, and the troop buildup succeeded not only in reducing violence but was credited with reviving surge-supporter Sen. John McCain’s Republican campaign for the presidency.

As for Washburn, he believed so strongly in the military mission, long before the surge, that while he was still recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., he managed to get his military status changed back to active duty.

“I have seen a lot of good things over in Iraq. I personally have stopped in the middle of patrols and handed out school supplies to the children and sometimes to school administrators,” he recalled of his service in 2004 and 2005.

He also considers himself very fortunate, explaining that the partial loss of his foot on May 17, 2005, could have been much worse.

“It was my fifth time that I’d gotten blown up, but the first time I got injured. So with only one injury, I feel very lucky,” Washburn said.

Now serving as commander of the Army National Guard’s Armory in Lockport, Washburn also works a civilian job as a corrections officer at the state’s Wende Correctional Facility in Alden.

He says it is a joy to be fully ambulatory and that he would not have sought active duty status again “if I couldn’t do my job and lead by example.”

Others also proud

Many other local war veterans have moved on with their lives, but it is a rare day when they do not think about their wartime service.

Natalie Ficarra, 24, moved across the country to California to start a new life after she completed her hitch in the Air Force, which had taken her three times to the Middle East between 2002 and 2005.

She attends Santa Monica College and plans to make a difference in the world when she graduates, perhaps working with an international adoption agency to help children.

When she first left the military, she says she wanted nothing to do with it. In time, she came to realize her military service was special.

“You settle down and relax and you realize that what you did was unique, and most people are intrigued when I tell them,” Ficarra said. “They think I’m so young and would never expect I was in the military. People look at you differently and have a new respect for you.”

When former Army Reserve Sgt. 1st Class Anthony M. Giancola thinks back to his service in helping rebuild Basra in southern Iraq, he says the honesty of his soldiers is among the most poignant of his memories.

“When we got into the routine of things, it started getting a bit monotonous, so I challenged two younger soldiers, Spc. Robert Male and Pvt. Roger Lee, to take on a project,” said Giancola, 39, of Buffalo’s Elmwood Village.

Male, a Buffalo Niagara resident, and Lee, a UB student from New York City, decided on a secondary school for girls.

“During the bidding process, there is an Arabic custom called bakshee, which means kickback or reward. When the winning bidder presented Spc. Male with the kickback, he pushed it back across the table to him, looked at the blueprints and asked the contractor if that money would cover the refurbishment of a guard shack. Some of the female students had been kidnapped and Spc. Male was concerned for their safety,” Giancola said.

The contractor took back the money and fixed the guard shack. But he was confused.

“It was a completely foreign concept to him. The contractor couldn’t understand our integrity,” said Giancola, who returned home, started a family and now works as an insurance agent.

He also carries another memory.

“The one thing I want to say is, I personally met a man in Basra who had gotten his ears cut off for listening to Kuwaiti radio,” Giancola said of the haunting image. “When I saw that, I knew Saddam had to go.”

The brutal dictator is now gone. He was found hiding in a hole on Dec. 13, 2003. Three years later, after a long and disorganized Iraqi trial, he was hanged.

But American troop deaths in Iraq continue.

As of Saturday, at least 3 ,988 members of the military have died since the war began.

lmichel@buffnews.com

Ellie

[thedrifter]

West Michigan soldiers embody nation's 5-year commitment to war in Iraq
Posted by Ted Roelofs | The Grand Rapids Press March 16, 2008 06:50AM

Two West Michigan men, thousands of miles apart, are flesh-and-blood reminders of the cost of five years of war.

Joshua Hoffman is a 26-year-old former Marine paralyzed by a sniper's bullet in Iraq in January 2007. Released from the Marines in September, he lies in a hospital bed in Virginia and tries to put the pieces of his life together.


"He has given everything but his life," said his mother, Reed City resident Hazel Hoffman. "In a sense, he has given his life because everything he had mapped and planned out is gone. It has been killed."

Master Sgt. Charles Friend is a 43-year-old Grand Rapids soldier stationed in Baghdad, on his third tour of Iraq. He understands the price soldiers such as Hoffman pay.

He also knows Americans have grown weary of the Iraq war, as U.S. deaths approach 4,000 and the number of wounded nears 30,000. Since it began on March 20, 2003, it has claimed the lives of 151 soldiers with ties to Michigan.

But Friend believes the commitment is one the nation must finish, despite its mounting toll in casualties and in dollars. Since 2001, the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have exceeded $650 billion.

A Congressional Budget Office estimate in October 2007 placed the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through the next decade far higher, at $2.4 trillion.

"I think we are making progress," Friend said. "The biggest thing is we have to not give back the ground we have made up."

Opinions vary

A year ago, his optimism might have seemed delusional. But with a drop in U.S. casualties in recent months and a decline in violence, coupled with incremental political progress, backers of the war are asking for patience. They do so as the war recedes in the presidential campaign to second place on the mind of voters, behind the economy.

A recent ABC News poll found 43 percent of Americans believe progress is being made toward civil order, compared with 32 percent in June. Still, just 34 percent believe the war was worth fighting.

In other words, the nation remains divided.

A Pew Research Center poll found 47 percent want U.S. troops to stay in Iraq until conditions are stable. It found 49 percent want them out as soon as possible.

That mirrors the shape of the presidential campaign. Presumptive GOP nominee Sen. John McCain is committed to staying put. Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want the troops out.

U.S. Rep. Vern Ehlers, R-Grand Rapids, isn't ready to pull the plug on U.S. commitment to Iraq.

While calling the early management of the war "deplorable," Ehlers sees improvement under the counter-insurgency plan drawn up by the top commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus.

"I think the country has made substantial progress in the last year. It does look promising," he said. "I think it would be stupid if, as the two Democratic presidential candidates are saying, we should just remove the troops."

U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Holland, also sees "significant progress" under the Petraeus plan. But Hoekstra said he would like to see the estimated 150,000 U.S. troops drawn down below 100,000 by the end of 2008.

At the same time, Hoekstra said the Iraqi government and security forces must step up.

"At a certain point in time, we are going to pull that shield away and, at that time, the future of the Iraqi government moves into the hands of the Iraqi people," he said. "We can't stay there indefinitely."

Hazel Hoffman, 46, confessed she was anything but enthusiastic about this war. She was "very bitter" when she learned her son, Joshua, had been paralyzed.

"I was not a supporter of the war. I felt he was wounded for nothing," Hoffman said.

But those feelings were overwhelmed by the needs of her son.

Plans go awry

Joshua Hoffman, who grew up in the Wayland area, joined the Marine Reserves in 2002, hoping to earn money for college. He planned to be a pilot.

He was attached to the Grand Rapids-based Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment. He was sent to Iraq's Anbar province in October 2006.

Joshua Hoffman was known as a dedicated Marine with a soft heart, befriending a stray puppy and giving out candy to Iraqi children.

He was hit in the early morning of Jan. 6 in an alley near Fallujah as he pursued an insurgent. A bullet entered his neck and exited his shoulder blade. It shattered his upper spine. He was transported to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, then to Bethesda Naval Hospital near Washington, D.C.

On Jan. 16, doctors summoned family members. Spinal fluid was leaking into his wound and causing infection. His fever spiked to more than 108 degrees.

"We were told he had 12 hours to live," Hazel Hoffman said. "They said to fly the family in to say goodbye to him."

Somehow, Joshua Hoffman pulled through. But doctors were unsure how much damage the fever had done to his brain.

Hazel Hoffman kept vigil at the side of her son, joined by Heather Lovell, his 21-year-old fiancee.

"Heather and I sat on each side of him and held his arms. We spent the next 12 hours with him, talking to him and praying. We wouldn't leave until they said he was going to be OK," Hazel Hoffman recalled.

The two have been with him almost all of the past year.

Lovell said she has the same love for Hoffman as the day he left for Iraq. They planned to marry after his return. With his injury, they have decided to wait on a wedding until things stabilize.

"He really is the same person. He has the same memories. He has the same smile, all the characteristics I saw in the beginning," Lovell said.

"To me, it's the same person."

Every day is 'a new challenge'

In February 2007, Hoffman was transferred to Hunter Holmes McGuire Veterans Administration Medical Center in Richmond, Va.

"Each day, you get up and it's a new challenge. Each day, you get up and you're thankful it's a new day," Hazel Hoffman said.

A few months ago, her son got a mucous plug stuck in his throat after doctors had removed a tracheotomy tube. Unable to cough it up, he began to choke.

Lovell had gone to summon help and returned to his room to find him turning blue.

"They said he would have died if Heather had not been there, " Hoffman said.

The family has gotten support and financial help from the Washington, D.C.-based Armed Forces Foundation, a nonprofit organization that offers aid to returning soldiers.

Douglas Stone, a spokesman for the foundation, said the price of war, especially with wounded troops, extends far beyond the battlefield.

"Divorce is a fairly big problem. It has extreme effects, not only on the soldier but on the relationship between the injured service member and his partner," Stone said.

"We have had mothers and fathers liquidate retirement funds to help a soldier."

Leaving bitterness behind

Thanks to housing assistance from the Marines, Hazel Hoffman and Lovell have been able to focus on Joshua.

Paralyzed from the chest down, he is getting his voice back and is able to whisper words such as "Mom." He communicates with a computerized device attached to his forehead.

Monday was a big day for Hoffman. He got out of the hospital for the first time without hospital staff, escorted by his mother and fiancee for an afternoon of shopping. It was his birthday.

Hoffman is due home at the end of the month, to an apartment in Kentwood he will share with Lovell. He is to have 24-hour nursing care paid for by the Veterans Administration.

Just as her son has done, Hazel Hoffman strives to leave the bitterness behind. And in the long months she has kept watch over him, Hoffman said, she has come to different terms with the value of his sacrifice.

"Since this past year, in talking to a lot of the wounded, I have come to realize the public doesn't know a lot of the facts. These people (Iraqis) really do need our help," Hoffman said.

While Lovell supports the troops "110 percent," she wrestles with the idea of this war.

"Do I think the war should continue? I don't think we have much of a choice. It's hard to answer. I'm not a huge supporter," she said.

Clearly, they have other things on their mind than the politics of this war.

Hazel Hoffman conceded there are days it takes all her strength to carry on. But then she remembers what her son has endured. Each inch of progress, each smile on his face is a victory worth celebrating.

There is so much they will never get back.

"There are things that hit me every once in a while," she said. "I will see a man and small child, and I know that Josh will never be able to hold his own child in his arms.

"He is never going to be able to run. He's never going to be able to throw a football.

"It's the little things that people take for granted."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

5 years in Iraq: Life goes on, but should the war?
Sunday, March 16, 2008
By Ted Roelofs
The Grand Rapids Press

Two West Michigan men, thousands of miles apart, are flesh-and-blood reminders of the cost of five years of war.

Joshua Hoffman is a 26-year-old former Marine paralyzed by a sniper's bullet in Iraq in January 2007. Released from the Marines in September, he lies in a hospital bed in Virginia and tries to put the pieces of his life together.

"He has given everything but his life," said his mother, Reed City resident Hazel Hoffman. "In a sense, he has given his life because everything he had mapped and planned out is gone. It has been killed."

Master Sgt. Charles Friend is a 43-year-old Grand Rapids soldier stationed in Baghdad, on his third tour of Iraq. He understands the price soldiers such as Hoffman pay.

He also knows Americans have grown weary of the Iraq war, as U.S. deaths approach 4,000 and the number of wounded nears 30,000. Since it began on March 20, 2003, it has claimed the lives of 151 soldiers with ties to Michigan.

But Friend believes the commitment is one the nation must finish, despite its mounting toll in casualties and in dollars. Since 2001, the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have exceeded $650 billion.

A Congressional Budget Office estimate in October 2007 placed the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through the next decade far higher, at $2.4 trillion.

"I think we are making progress," Friend said. "The biggest thing is we have to not give back the ground we have made up."


Opinions vary

A year ago, his optimism might have seemed delusional. But with a drop in U.S. casualties in recent months and a decline in violence, coupled with incremental political progress, backers of the war are asking for patience. They do so as the war recedes in the presidential campaign to second place on the mind of voters, behind the economy.

A recent ABC News poll found 43 percent of Americans believe progress is being made toward civil order, compared with 32 percent in June. Still, just 34 percent believe the war was worth fighting.

In other words, the nation remains divided.

A Pew Research Center poll found 47 percent want U.S. troops to stay in Iraq until conditions are stable. It found 49 percent want them out as soon as possible.

That mirrors the shape of the presidential campaign. Presumptive GOP nominee Sen. John McCain is committed to staying put. Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want the troops out.

U.S. Rep. Vern Ehlers, R-Grand Rapids, isn't ready to pull the plug on U.S. commitment to Iraq.

While calling the early management of the war "deplorable," Ehlers sees improvement under the counter-insurgency plan drawn up by the top commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus.

"I think the country has made substantial progress in the last year. It does look promising," he said. "I think it would be stupid if, as the two Democratic presidential candidates are saying, we should just remove the troops."

U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Holland, also sees "significant progress" under the Petraeus plan. But Hoekstra said he would like to see the estimated 150,000 U.S. troops drawn down below 100,000 by the end of 2008.

At the same time, Hoekstra said the Iraqi government and security forces must step up.

"At a certain point in time, we are going to pull that shield away and, at that time, the future of the Iraqi government moves into the hands of the Iraqi people," he said. "We can't stay there indefinitely."

Hazel Hoffman, 46, confessed she was anything but enthusiastic about this war. She was "very bitter" when she learned her son, Joshua, had been paralyzed.

"I was not a supporter of the war. I felt he was wounded for nothing," Hoffman said.

But those feelings were overwhelmed by the needs of her son.


Plans go awry

Joshua Hoffman, who grew up in the Wayland area, joined the Marine Reserves in 2002, hoping to earn money for college. He planned to be a pilot.

He was attached to the Grand Rapids-based Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment. He was sent to Iraq's Anbar province in October 2006.

Joshua Hoffman was known as a dedicated Marine with a soft heart, befriending a stray puppy and giving out candy to Iraqi children.

He was hit in the early morning of Jan. 6 in an alley near Fallujah as he pursued an insurgent. A bullet entered his neck and exited his shoulder blade. It shattered his upper spine. He was transported to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, then to Bethesda Naval Hospital near Washington, D.C.

On Jan. 16, doctors summoned family members. Spinal fluid was leaking into his wound and causing infection. His fever spiked to more than 108 degrees.

"We were told he had 12 hours to live," Hazel Hoffman said. "They said to fly the family in to say goodbye to him."

Somehow, Joshua Hoffman pulled through. But doctors were unsure how much damage the fever had done to his brain.

Hazel Hoffman kept vigil at the side of her son, joined by Heather Lovell, his 21-year-old fiancee.

"Heather and I sat on each side of him and held his arms. We spent the next 12 hours with him, talking to him and praying. We wouldn't leave until they said he was going to be OK," Hazel Hoffman recalled.

The two have been with him almost all of the past year.

Lovell said she has the same love for Hoffman as the day he left for Iraq. They planned to marry after his return. With his injury, they have decided to wait on a wedding until things stabilize.

"He really is the same person. He has the same memories. He has the same smile, all the characteristics I saw in the beginning," Lovell said.

"To me, it's the same person."


Every day is 'a new challenge'

In February 2007, Hoffman was transferred to Hunter Holmes McGuire Veterans Administration Medical Center in Richmond, Va.

"Each day, you get up and it's a new challenge. Each day, you get up and you're thankful it's a new day," Hazel Hoffman said.

A few months ago, her son got a mucous plug stuck in his throat after doctors had removed a tracheotomy tube. Unable to cough it up, he began to choke.

Lovell had gone to summon help and returned to his room to find him turning blue.

"They said he would have died if Heather had not been there, " Hoffman said.

The family has gotten support and financial help from the Washington, D.C.-based Armed Forces Foundation, a nonprofit organization that offers aid to returning soldiers.

Douglas Stone, a spokesman for the foundation, said the price of war, especially with wounded troops, extends far beyond the battlefield.

"Divorce is a fairly big problem. It has extreme effects, not only on the soldier but on the relationship between the injured service member and his partner," Stone said.

"We have had mothers and fathers liquidate retirement funds to help a soldier."


Leaving bitterness behind

Thanks to housing assistance from the Marines, Hazel Hoffman and Lovell have been able to focus on Joshua.

Paralyzed from the chest down, he is getting his voice back and is able to whisper words such as "Mom." He communicates with a computerized device attached to his forehead.

Monday was a big day for Hoffman. He got out of the hospital for the first time without hospital staff, escorted by his mother and fiancee for an afternoon of shopping. It was his birthday.

Hoffman is due home at the end of the month, to an apartment in Kentwood he will share with Lovell. He is to have 24-hour nursing care paid for by the Veterans Administration.

Just as her son has done, Hazel Hoffman strives to leave the bitterness behind. And in the long months she has kept watch over him, Hoffman said, she has come to different terms with the value of his sacrifice.

"Since this past year, in talking to a lot of the wounded, I have come to realize the public doesn't know a lot of the facts. These people (Iraqis) really do need our help," Hoffman said.

While Lovell supports the troops "110 percent," she wrestles with the idea of this war.

"Do I think the war should continue? I don't think we have much of a choice. It's hard to answer. I'm not a huge supporter," she said.

Clearly, they have other things on their mind than the politics of this war.

Hazel Hoffman conceded there are days it takes all her strength to carry on. But then she remembers what her son has endured. Each inch of progress, each smile on his face is a victory worth celebrating.

There is so much they will never get back.

"There are things that hit me every once in a while," she said. "I will see a man and small child, and I know that Josh will never be able to hold his own child in his arms.

"He is never going to be able to run. He's never going to be able to throw a football.

"It's the little things that people take for granted."


Send e-mail to the author: troelofs@grpress.com

Ellie