Success in Iraq? Try Listening to the Troops

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/07/3682/

Success in Iraq? Try Listening to the Troops
by Aaron Glantz

snip//

Or consider the example of Specialist Joshua Casteel, who arrived as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib after the prisoner abuse scandal broke and found almost all the detainees were innocent.

“I was constantly being asked, tell me about freedom, about democracy, why am I being held here, I want answers,” Casteel told me. “And the detainees were the ones wanting answers. But that was our job. We were supposed to be finding answers to our questions.”

(Casteel’s observations are backed up by the International Red Cross, which monitors prisoners in U.S. custody, estimates 70 to 90 percent of those arrested were plucked off the street by mistake).

With experiences like these it’s no wonder that an overwhelming number of American soldiers and Marines want the war to end. In February 2006, pollster John Zogby conducted a survey of U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq. Seventy-two percent said that U.S. troops should be pulled out within one year. Of those, 29 percent said they should withdraw “immediately.”

After more than four years of war, most American soldiers know the same things about Iraq that the American people do: that the invasion of Iraq was based on lies, that there was no link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks and that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

“That was my first slap in the face and everybody already knew there were no weapons,” Lance Corporal Jeff Key told me, explaining how he came to oppose the war after serving in Iraq. “That was not news that got in to us. By the time it was there — they’ll spill anything to these young people in the military. The last thing that Bush Co. and his crowd wants is for the truth to get out of Iraq or Iraq or into Iraq. That’s why they’re stopping military people from blogging and that’s why they don’t want soldiers in Iraq to know that there are Iraq war veterans here in this country that are speaking out against this war.”

I’m sure these veterans would love to share their stories with President Bush — to give him a piece of their mind. In the meantime, I’ve posted them, along with other true, first-person accounts of the war, on-line at warcomeshome.org. Perhaps members of Congress will take a listen, and decide that funding the war in Iraq isn’t such a smart idea anymore.



Aaron Glantz is an award-winning journalist who reported from Iraq over the first three years of the war, and is the author of the best-selling book, How America Lost Iraq.

[babylonsister]

1. .

[w8liftinglady]

2. It's irrelevant what the troops say,sadly.

To those who call the shots,the troops are no more than implements to make more profit.I wish more would speak out.Maybe they are,and we are just not hearing them...

[gateley]

3. I think this administration makes it impossible for them to speak out. Nice. n/t

[babylonsister]

4. Big welcome to DU, gateley.

:hi: They are speaking out, slowly but surely.