MILITARY

War vets drum up support at state Capitol

‘What we need now is a discussion about how to win,’ says Vets for Freedom’s executive director.

By Marty Toohey
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, March 21, 2008

A national bus tour of decorated Iraq and Afghanistan veterans cruised through Central Texas on Thursday, stopping at the steps of the state Capitol to encourage people to support the wars.

Elected officials and speakers with the national group Vets for Freedom, addressing a crowd of about 100 people, said the war is close to being won, and that soldiers are the people whose opinion on the matter should matter most.

“The bravery that compelled them toward the sounds of battle strengthens them in the arena of personal opinion,” Gov. Rick Perry said.

David Bellavia, a former Army sergeant who has been nominated for a Medal of Honor for his actions during the Battle of Fallujah, said politicians have largely erred in calling for the war’s end.

Bellavia, co-founder of Vets for Freedom, said the group is touring to counteract what politicians have been saying about the war.

“We’re the ambassadors of the warrior class … and we would like to have the same credibility as our politicians,” he said. “I lost 36 men (in Iraq), 320 wounded … and because of that, we fight with the same tenacity at home as we do on the battlefield.”

Retired Army Capt. Pete Hegseth, the organization’s executive director, said the success of the war is reflected in some statistics. Since June 2007, he said, the violence between the Sunni and Shiite sects and the attacks on American soldiers have decreased significantly, and 200,000 Iraqis have joined the country’s security forces.

“We have members in our organization who do and don’t think we should have gone into Iraq,” Hegseth said. “But what we need now is a discussion about how to win.”

Some speakers took aim at war protesters.

“War is not clean,” said Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel. “With all the people, particularly here in Travis County, running around saying it’s not going well … they don’t understand the concept (of war), they don’t know how it’s executed, they don’t understand there’s ups and downs in every conflict.”

mtoohey@statesman.com; 445-3673

March 21, 2008 — JUDGING by the way much of the Western media is dealing with the Iraq War’s fifth anniversary, we’re still fighting the acrimonious debates of 2002 and early 2003. Focusing on the past, however, may prevent us from understanding what’s happening in Iraq today and its effect on the broader region.The war had three objectives:

* To dismantle the regime of terror created by Saddam Hussein and his Tikriti clan.

* To restore to the Iraqi people the power that the Tikritis had usurped.

* To help Iraqis build a new system that might, in time, become a model for other Muslim countries.

The first two objectives have been achieved. The Tikritis are gone. Iraqis have regained their usurped power and exercised it in two general elections and one referendum. The only useful debate, therefore, is whether or not the third objective has been achieved.

At first glance, it hasn’t. Anyone watching on TV the frequent suicide attacks and car bombs, not to mention vigilante groups on the rampage, would not want this Iraq for a model.

Other facts also make new Iraq look unattractive. While over 1.5 million Iraqis returned home after Saddam Hussein fell, as many fled to neighboring countries after 2004. A further 2 million have become “displaced persons” inside Iraq.

Nevertheless, it’s possible to argue that Iraq has achieved a measure of success in dealing with some basic problems that Muslim states, most of them post-colonial creations, have failed to solve for decades.

The first of these concerns legitimacy, an issue linked with that of the origin of power.

In traditional Muslim states, legitimacy is based on dynastic claims with a veneer of religious authority.

In the so-called republics, it’s based on foundation myths, military coups d’etat marketed as revolutions. The myths are then exploited to justify arbitrary rule by small, clan-based, military elites backed by brutal security services.

In post-Saddam Iraq, however, the source of legitimacy is the people’s will as expressed in free elections.

None of the political parties and certainly none of the scores of political figures that have emerged on the national scene since 2003 would claim legitimacy on the basis of divine mandate, mythical event or blood ties.

To people in more mature democracies, all this may sound trite. In a nation trying to come to terms with the modern world, it’s a vital concern. The popular legitimacy of power in new Iraq is illustrated by the fact that it’s the only Muslim state that didn’t have its constitution written and imposed by a narrow ruling elite.

Iraq’s constitution was made through a process that involved thousands of people in two years of consultation and debate, followed by closer scrutiny at an elected Constituent Assembly and, ultimately, a popular referendum. In that sense, all 11 million or so Iraqis who voted could be regarded as founding fathers and mothers of new Iraq.

Iraq’s second achievement is the consensus it has developed over the exercise of power. New Iraq is the only Muslim country with a system of separation of powers and checks and balances.

In Iran, which like Iraq has a Shiite majority, a single individual, the “Supreme Guide,” has unlimited powers over state institutions in the name of the “Hidden Imam.”

In Turkey, an unelected National Security Council, dominated by the military, can transcend civilian authority and impose its choices.

In Syria, a “star chamber” dominated by the president, himself chosen in a one-candidate election, can annul decisions by the legislature and judiciary.

The third major problem that Iraq has started to tackle concerns the overconcentration of power as observed in almost all Muslim states. In Iran, even opening a private school in any of the 30 provinces requires approval from Tehran, ultimately from the “Supreme Guide” himself. In Syria, a permit to operate a taxi in Aleppo must be approved in Damascus. The term decentralization doesn’t have a proper equivalent in Arabic, Persian or Turkish.

New Iraq, however, is designed with decentralization in mind. Over the next few years, with elected regional assemblies in place, Iraq will develop into a federal state, something unknown in the Muslim world.

The fourth issue that new Iraq is trying to tackle concerns ethnic and/or religious diversity. Almost all Muslim countries are home to a variety of ethnic and/or religious communities, often with long histories of mutual suspicion if not enmity.

The usual method is to ignore diversity.

In Egypt, the Coptic minority, some 10 percent of the population, has no representation in the national parliament.

In Turkey, the state has long pretended that 15 million Kurds don’t even exist. (They are called “Mountain Turks.”)

In Iran, few Arabs, Kurds, Baluchis and Turkmen are found either in the parliament or in the higher echelons of power even though they account for 15 percent of the population. Iranian Sunni Muslims, some 12 percent of the population, are not allowed to have a single mosque in Tehran.

New Iraq offers a different model in which diversity is allowed full expression through power-sharing in a federal system.

Finally, Iraq is also trying to tackle the problem of sharing the country’s wealth, especially oil.

In most oil-producing Muslim countries, the state has exclusive control over the industry and the sharing of the revenues. Often, this results in corruption and regional disparities.

In new Iraq, the regions are allocated shares proportionate to their demographic strength, while parliament has the final word on the national budget.

Iraq is tackling problems that most Muslim nations have ignored or failed to solve and already shows some signs of success.

To be sure, history isn’t written in advance. New Iraq may still fail in its courageous attempt at developing an alternative to various forms of despotism that have dominated the region for centuries. Its friends may abandon it before its successes have been consolidated. Its enemies, working round-the-clock to make sure it does not develop into a rival model, may end up having the last laugh.

Now, however, as we mark the war’s fifth anniversary, new Iraq, despite its many travails, appears to be on the right path.

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 War vets: Finish the job

The Arizona Republic
Mar. 21, 2008 12:00 AM

Almost the entire, years-long debate over the American military’s presence in Iraq has been waged as though the soldiers themselves were not in the room.

And, usually, for good reason . . . they weren’t in the room. By and large, policy makers on both left and right rarely have thought to ask the very people who have served on the front lines for their opinion.

That has changed. Maybe nobody’s asking, but the soldiers are telling, like it or not.

An organization of Iraq war veterans known as Vets for Freedom - claiming 44 chapters nationwide and some 20,000 members - has launched a national tour, speaking out on what they believe is a near-universal principle among Iraq war vets: Finish the job.

Two of the organization’s leaders - Steven Russell, a now-retired Army lieutenant colonel and a recipient of the Silver Star for bravery under fire, and Capt. Peter Hegseth, a National Guard officer who earned a Bronze Star in Iraq as a platoon leader - visited The Republic’s editorial board earlier this week.

They call their effort the “National Heroes Tour,” and it is featuring some of the bravest of the brave, including Silver Star recipient Marco Martinez and Marcus Luttrell, sole survivor of a Navy SEAL mission on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

“All the second-guessing is moot, at this point,” said Russell, who led the battalion that captured Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. “We are where we are now. A destabilized Iraq is going to have implications for all of us.”

A part of the tour mission is to express thanks to the men and women who have risked their lives in a war zone. But there is no denying the underlying mission, which is that the efforts of those thousands must not be wasted by leaving Iraq too soon.

“Overall, we’re very positive about the trajectory in Iraq now, as long as we don’t leave precipitously,” said Hegseth, the executive director of Vets for Freedom.

Obviously, the debate over the future conduct of the war in Iraq will go on.

But, thanks to organizations like Vets for Freedom, it will not continue without a word from the people who have been there with their lives on the line.

Iraq Portrait: How the Press Has Covered Events on the Ground

December 19, 2007

Through the first 10 months of the year, the picture of Iraq that Americans received from the news media was, in considerable measure, a grim one. Roughly half of the reporting has consisted of accounts of daily violence. And stories that explicitly assessed the direction of the war have tended toward pessimism, according to a new study of press coverage of events on the ground in Iraq from January through October of 2007.

In what Defense Department statistics show to be the deadliest year so far for U.S. forces in Iraq, journalists have responded to the challenge of covering the continuing violence by keeping many of the accounts of these attacks brief and limiting the interpretation they contain.

As the year went on, the narrative from Iraq brightened in some ways. The drumbeat of reports about daily attacks declined in late summer and fall, and with that came a decline in the amount of coverage from Iraq overall.

This shift in coverage beginning in June, in turn, coincided with a rising sense among the American public that military efforts in Iraq were going “very” or “fairly well.”

These are some of the findings of a study of more than 1,100 stories from January through October from 40 different news outlets conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research institute that examines the press.

The findings suggest, among other things, that the bigger question may be not how the press interprets events but what kinds of events get covered, especially by a press corps whose movements are severely restricted in Iraq by the threat of attack and who are most mobile when embedded with U.S. troops.

The results of the study of the content of Iraq coverage also correlate to a great extent with attitudes expressed by journalists working in Iraq themselves. In a survey released by the Project in November, most journalists said they felt that the operations of the military were thoroughly covered, but they viewed the lives of ordinary Iraqis and the sense of daily life as the most “undercovered” subject. The findings here about what topics were covered tend to confirm the assessment of the journalists on the ground.

Among the study’s findings:

• Daily accounts of violence made up 47% of all stories studied during the first 10 months of 2007. But because many of these stories were short, that represented just 27% of the time and space-or newshole-of the coverage studied.
• Through June, more than half of all stories studied were about violent incidents, but that number fell to roughly one third in September and October.

  

• Just more than half (56%) of the stories that offered a clear assessment of where things in Iraq were headed were pessimistic, but that coverage was more skeptical of the Iraqi government and the stability of the country than it was of U.S. policy.
• Stories assessing the effectiveness of U.S. policy-including the surge-more often than not were neither distinctly positive nor negative in the message they conveyed. Four in ten offered a mixed assessment, while a third were pessimistic and a quarter saw things as improving.
• A separate analysis of coverage in November, beyond the time frame of the main study, indicates that during that month positive assessments of the surge began to rise.
• The coverage overall was U.S. centric in subject matter. About half of all the coverage from Iraq was about the American military and U.S. officials. Roughly another 10% was about private contractors, mostly Blackwater.
• Coverage of Iraqi civilians, by contrast, made up far less, 3% of stories and 5% of overall newshole.
• Despite enormous difficulty in getting access to sources, Americans did get a wide range of perspectives. Fully 40% of stories (representing 61% of the newshole) carried the views of multiple of types of stakeholders.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism is a non-partisan, non-ideological research institute that studies the press. It is one of eight projects that make up the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C., a “fact tank” funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.