One of my latest blogrollees is The Adventures of Chester, a MilBlog. I found Chester by way of The Belmont Club who linked to Chester's juxtaposition of Time Magazine article Chasing the Ghosts by Michael Ware, against descriptions of the same events by Col H.R. McMaster, Commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. The subject was the battle for Tall Afar. As the title of the Time article suggests, Ware paints a picture of American futility.
Chasing the Ghosts
With doubts about Iraq growing at home, U.S. forces are struggling to put down an elusive and inexhaustible enemy. Michael Ware reports on the state of the counterinsurgency from the front lines of the biggest battle of the year
"Chasing the elusive and inexhaustible Ghosts" conjures images of noble patriotic guerrilla fighters -- the Minute Men, the French Resistance. Just who are these glorious fighters? Col McMaster tells us who they are.
I'd like just to briefly characterize the enemy, describe who we're fighting here. This is an enemy, who when they came in, they removed all the imams from the mosques, and they replaced them with Islamic extremist laymen. They removed all the teachers from the schools and replaced them with people who had a fifth-grade education and who preached hatred and intolerance. They murdered people. In each of their cells that they have within the city has a direct action cell of about 100 or so fighters. They have a kidnapping and murder cell; they have a propaganda cell, a mortar cell, a sniper cell -- a very high degree of organization here. And what the enemy did is to keep the population from performing other activities. To keep the population afraid, they kidnapped and murdered large numbers of the people here, and it was across the spectrum. A Sunni Turkmen imam was kidnapped and murdered. A very fine man, a city councilman, Councilman Suliman (sp), was pulled out of his car in front of his children and his wife and gunned down with about 30 gunshot wounds to his head. The enemy conducted indiscriminate mortar attacks against populated areas and wounded scores of children and killed many others. The enemy here did just the most horrible things you can imagine, in one case murdering a child, placing a booby trap within the child's body and waiting for the parent to come recover the body of their child and exploding it to kill the parents. Beheadings and so forth.
So maybe we can skip the "noble" part. But how about "elusive and inexhaustible"? Col McMaster has more:
We had some very heavy fighting on the 5th and 6th of September, during which we killed many of the enemy, who engaged us from their forward defensive positions. And it was at that point that the enemy shifted their approach again to essentially running away from the area. They gave the word to retreat. They did everything they could to blend in with the civilians who were evacuating from this dense urban area to protect them, and we caught them. We were integrated with the population. The people were pointing out who the enemy was. We had Iraqi army who was very good at sensing something isn't quite right when this man is walking down the street with children, and the children look very nervous. This one man in particular was a beheader who had beheaded over 20 people. And we were able to capture him as the children fled, as we came up to talk to this individual, and the children related to us this man said that they had to walk with him or he would kill them.
We captured five of the enemy dressed as women, trying desperately to get out of the area. Just yesterday we captured 104 of the enemy in these outlying areas.
So we relentlessly pursued the enemy as they attempted to break contact with our forces. But we're maintaining contact with them, and we're continuing to hunt them down.
The question is, why such a disparity between Time and the commander in the field? Is this just the Administration dredging up some army officer to put a happy face on the campaign in Iraq? Well, according to Chester:
Col McMaster is the author of a bestselling book on Vietnam, Dereliction of Duty : Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. Why would he write such a scathing text, then go on to repeat those same errors? I'm willing to bet he's calling it like he sees it. Here's an excerpt from his book:
Johnson's preoccupation with his domestic legislative program led him to obscure from the public and the Congress the extent of the difficulties in Vietnam. Despite his efforts to suppress the stories, however, newspapers had carried front-page articles on the US ambassador's row with the South Vietnamese generals and on the military defeats suffered by the South Vietnamese Army at the hands of the Viet Cong. On January 21 Johnson arranged a meeting with key Democratic and Republilcan members of the House and Senate. The meeting convened as General Khanh was charging the administration with grossly understating the degree of Communist infiltration from North Vietnam. Coincidentally, the purpose of the meeting with the legislators was to propagate the administration's spuriously optimistic assessment. [emphasis added]
It doesn't jive that the same man who wrote that in 1997 would now willingly abandon such convictions to spuriously provide overly optimistic assessments of our current conflict. I think we can cut that criticism off at the pass.
Well then, what about Ware, who wrote the Time article? Wretchard has this from ABC Television in Australia, in which Michael Ware is interviewed by one Tony Jones.
TONY JONES: Michael, why are they letting you get behind this curtain? Is there a message they are wanting you to get out through Time magazine to the rest of the world?
MICHAEL WARE: Clearly, these men, just like the American military I deal with and the public affairs officers who stick to me like glue and only let me see what they want me to see when I'm with them, so it is with the Jihadis. They're showing me what they want me to see, which is, to be truthful, quite a lot, but they know anything I see or hear is public record. It's their responsibility to confine their information.
This is what I do. Yeah, they do want to get a message out.
They're so media savvy. If they weren't before, they've learnt it, they've polished it.
Even a year ago when I was meeting these nationalist guerrillas who then were ill formed, not yet in clear command and control organisations, even then they were saying to me, "This war is not going to be won on the battlefield. We can't hope to defeat the Americans. It's going to be won in the living rooms of Iraq and Middle America, it's going to be won on television."
Well, it looks like helpful Michael is just doing his little part to help the nice insurgents. Isn't he just precious.
