Iraq

A General has apologized to the Iraqi people after it was discovered that an American soldier had used the Koran for target practice.  Also in Iraq, the Iraqi government has reported it has captured a top Al Qaida leader in the northern city of Mosul, but the US is still attempting to verify this.

Afghanistan

The Australian military has initiated a major campaign against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan in what they are calling a “major push” to clear out extremist fighters.

Washington

The National Security Advisor, Stephen J. Hadley acknowledged that Iranian backed Hezbollah’s move against the Lebanese government was a tactical success but warns that the move may backfire and time will tell if the Lebanese people will  tolerate the move.

Veterans, Troops and Other Military News

 The US Air Force has delivered over 200,000 of relief supplies to China which was the first assistance from a foreign military to arrive in China since the May 12 quake.  The question of whether the Purple Heart should be awarded to those soldiers diagnosed with PTSD has sparked debate at the Department of Defense and Secretary Gates has indicated that “it’s clearly something that needs to be looked at.”

I don’t always agree with everything that Secretary Gates says (allowing himself and the DoD’s payroll to be used in the funding arguments for one) but I think he’s all over this one.  Of course, if he’d said any of this stuff a couple of years ago, half the administration would have tried to run him out of the country for being unpatriotic.

From Military.com: Gates Criticizes DoD Iraq War Planning

May 16, 2008

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon’s slow response to wartime challenges such as protecting troops against roadside bombs stemmed in part from a mistaken belief within the defense establishment that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would be short, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.

In remarks prepared for delivery to the Business Executives for National Security May 15, Gates cited three areas in which he has pushed for speedier solutions to battlefield issues: a need for more pilotless drones for surveillance, more bomb-resistant vehicles to protect troops and improved treatment of the wounded.

“We must put our defense bureaucracies on a war footing with a wartime sense of urgency,” Gates said, according to a text of his prepared remarks provided by the Pentagon. He was delivering the speech at a ceremony in which he was receiving the business group’s Eisenhower Award for his wartime leadership.

Probably no one else can analyze and discuss the Pentagon’s failings with the authority and bipartisan immunity from attack as Mr. Gates and it is good that he is doing so.  Both his assessment that the entire government is not at war and that that was from a failure of leadership seem dead on to me.

In his speech, Gates made no direct mention of Rumsfeld or others who held leadership positions in the early stages of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he made clear his view that the defense establishment has been too focused on the future, at the expense of more immediate solutions.

“A lesson I learned fairly early on was that important elements of the defense establishment were not at war,” he said in his prepared remarks. “The needs of those in combat too often were not addressed urgently or creatively” because too many people in the Pentagon were “preoccupied with future capabilities and procurement programs, wedded to lumbering peacetime process and procedures, stuck in bureaucratic low gear.”

He cited a variety of “leadership shortcomings” that limited the Pentagon’s ability to adapt quickly in Iraq and Afghanistan, including “an assumption that the war would soon be over.” He cited the example of fielding a new, more bomb-resistant armored vehicle for troops on both battlefields.

Now if he can admit all that, can the Congress push for a little more accountability please?

Items of note seemed to come with breakneck speed this week - exciting progress on the 21st Century GI Bill and dismaying revelations from the VA.  But two appearances on the TV machine stood out.  First, Senator Webb was on Meet the Press and hit hard to dispel the Pentagon’s idiotic and insulting assertion that Soldiers will abandon the Army en masse if offered a fair GI Bill:

MR. RUSSERT:  The Pentagon, the administration and other editorials across the country have said the problem with the bill is that if, after three years people can leave with full benefits, it’ll be very difficult to retain good soldiers, to have them re-enlist.

SEN. WEBB:  Well, I, I would say to them that three years of accumulated service qualify you for the benefits, but you still have to serve your enlistment.  I spent five years in the Pentagon–one as a Marine, four as a defense executive.  I did manpower issues the whole time; I know how these formulas work.  We have, as co-sponsors on this bill, John Warner, former chairman of the Armed Services Committee; Carl Levin, current chairman of the Armed Services committee; Chairman Akaka of the Veterans committee; Senator Specter, former chairman of the, the Veterans committee; Chuck Hagel, the only senator to have served as a senior official in the Veterans Administration. We know what we’re doing and, and we are not going to harm the military.

What you have is 70 to 75 percent of the ground troops in the, in the Army, in the Marine Corps, have left the service by the end of their first enlistment. And those are the people that are not being taken care of.  The Department of Defense does a very good job of taking care of the, the career force, but this large number of people, the overwhelming majority of people who are out of the military, that come in because they love their country, they do a hitch and then they want to get on with their lives, they are not getting the opportunity for a first-class future that they deserve.

You can see this and other parts of the interview at MSNBC.

Next was a moving and overdue piece about Kirk Johnson and his The List Project (thelistproject.org) on Sixty Minutes.  Johnson is as committed, talented, and hardworking a young man as you will find and the energy he directs into doing the right thing not just for his associates from Iraq but for our Nation’s reputation are heroic. 

(CBS) The refugee crisis in Iraq is among the biggest humanitarian emergencies in the world. Millions of Iraqis have fled the war, many marked for death because they worked for the United States. They were translators, office workers, many other things, but now the enemy has branded them as collaborators.

When that happened in Vietnam, the U.S. brought more than 100,000 refugees to the states. But today, the U.S. government, which was so desperate for Iraqi workers, is not so eager to help them now.

As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, one young American named Kirk Johnson has jumped into this breach. All he wanted to do was rescue one of his Iraqi co-workers. When he did, a thousand more pleaded for help and Johnson began “the list.”

“The people on my list have been tortured, they’ve been raped, they’ve lost body limbs. There’s one guy on my list who’s been thrown out of a moving vehicle. And all of this because they helped us. They came every single day to try to pitch in, in our efforts there,” Johnson tells Pelley.

These were two worthy and Soldierly pieces for an Armed Forces Day weekend.

IAVA’s Director of Government Affairs, Todd Bowers, is scheduled to be on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams tonight for a segment on the GI Bill.

NBC
6:30PM ET
For a full listing of air times by state, click here.

Iraq

Iraqi Army Soldiers have been conducting house to house searches for Al Qaeda in the city of Mosul which has been called the last urban stronghold of AQ in Iraqi urban areas. 

Afghanistan

A car bomb killed an Afghan soldier while continued clashes in Southern Afghanistan have left 8 militants dead.  Also in Afghanistan, the UN is accusing foreign intelligence agencies, possibly the CIA,  of conducting operations in Afghanistan, with no accountability to the Afghan government or the foreign military command in that country. 

Washington

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is challenging the Department of Defense to develop a “wartime sense of urgency” after criticizing them for assuming the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be short and focusing too much time on the next war and not enough time focusing on the wars at hand.   John McCain predicted that the war in Iraq would be over by 2013.

The House voted on Thursday to improve the GI Bill benefits and will pay for it by increasing taxes by 500 dollars for those who make over 1 million dollars, or as Representative John Tanner, one of the bills newest supporters,  said:  ”This is dedicated funding, and it comes from people in this country who have the most to give to the people who gave the most.”

Troops, Veterans, and Other Military News

 The 82^nd Airborne has announced that they will be returning from Iraq two months earlier than expected.   West Point is considering changing the lyrics of its beloved alma mater and its companion piece “The Corps” to more gender neutral lyrics to reflect the female graduates of the academy.

Michael Hastings, a correspondent for Newsweek, details how his brother’s fellow platoon leaders have recovered, physically and professionally, after being severely wounded in Iraq.

The war there is not an intellectual exercise. It has real, personal consequences.

This was the first time I’d really gotten to know other Americans who live with the consequences of the war. While I was in Iraq covering the war for Newsweek for two years starting in 2005, the woman I planned to marry was murdered in Baghdad by insurgents on Jan. 17, 2007. Her name was Andi Parhamovich; she’d come to Iraq to work for the National Democratic Institute, an NGO. After she was killed, I returned to the U.S. and started writing. It was an act of survival, a way for me to try to make sense of what happened and to give the beautiful woman I loved a lasting tribute.

We — Andi, me, Jeff, Greg, Scott, Ferris — all chose to go to Iraq, volunteers for our respective causes. We were under no illusions about the risks, though that’s a glib way of putting it. I don’t think anyone can fully grasp the risks until whoosh, wham, through the looking glass you crash on the way to the rehab center at Walter Reed or a funeral parlor in Ohio.

Iraq often gets treated by pundits, writers and politicians — all those thoughtful cheerleaders turned war critics — as an intellectual exercise. It’s not. Hundreds of thousands live personally with its consequences every day. The tens of thousands of Iraqis who’ve been killed, the families of 4,074 American servicemen and women killed, the more than 900 contractors killed, the more than 29,000 U.S. wounded. The individuals who make up such statistics — and those who loved them — understand what the war actually costs. How paying that cost feels.

IAVA is working with reporters at two major print news organizations.  If you might be a fit for either story, please e-mail michael[at]iava.org.  Please pass these requests onto anyone you know who qualifies. Thanks!

1) A reporter is researching a story about Iraq or Afghanistan veterans who are facing foreclosure or have already lost their home to foreclosure. 

2) A reporter is looking for recently returned or currently deployed servicemembers who were given SSRIs (Prozac, Zoloft, etc) by the military to help with depression, anxiety or another mental health issue.  The reporter is interested in whether you had a positive or negative experience with the medication.

This should get good notice today as the facts are known. Visit the CREW site for a look at the actual documents. Within the comments are several from Family Members that dealt with the memo writer. The Temple VA is full of good people struggling with staff shortages and a massive overload of incoming patients from Fort Hood. They are on the cutting edge of some of the most interesting PTSD research. One of the psychiatrists there told my wife that he struggles to give good care to everyone he sees but felt they were only seeing about 40% of the people they should. While it is obvious that the doc in the referenced memo should go I think it’s important that some of the research they are doing stay or be hurried. Once there is a truly agreed upon and efficient test for the physical manifestation of PTSD, Luddites like Ms. Perez will have no recourse for their stinting.

On March 20, 2008 a VA hospital’s PTSD program coordinator sent the e-mail below to a number of VA employees, including psychologists, social workers, and a psychiatrist stating that due to an increased number of “compensation seeking veterans,” the staff should “refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out” and they should “R/O [rule out] PTSD” and consider a diagnosis of “Adjustment Disorder” instead:

CREW and VoteVets release email telling VA staff to “refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out” | Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

This afternoon, the House of Representatives made history.  By an overwhelming margin, lawmakers passed the landmark new GI Bill which will make college affordable to the more than 1.6 million Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. 

As President Roosevelt said when he signed the original GI Bill for veterans of World War II,

 ”[The GI Bill] gives emphatic notice to the men and women in our armed forces that the American people do not intend to let them down.”

The House of Representatives renewed that promise.  This is a tremendous and bipartisan commitment to our troops.  We’ve seen enough bumper sticker and lapel pin patriotism; today, we saw the real thing. 

The House vote is a crucial first step, but there is more to be done to get this bill made law.  The GI Bill, which passed as a part of the war supplemental funding, still has to be approved by the Senate and be signed by the President.  A second step was also taken today, as the Senate Appropriations Committee moved their matching GI Bill proposal out of committee.

I’d like to take a minute to talk about the people who deserve credit for moving the GI Bill this far:

• First and foremost, the bipartisan coalition of combat veterans who introduced the new GI Bill: Senators Webb, Hagel, Warner, and Lautenberg who put partisanship aside in favor of a fair benefit for the troops who served after them.
• The veterans’ organizations (led by the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, the Military Officers Association, and IAVA) who stood united on this issue, kept up the pressure, and refused to accept compromised or watered-down benefits.
• The many other supporters of a new GI Bill — including at least 22 governors, an array of higher education groups, and of course, thousands of regular Americans who pressured their representatives to make this bill a top priority.

What’s next?  The Senate floor vote that may happen as early as Monday of next week.  At this point, I am convinced the GI Bill has become an unstoppable force - but I’ve been disappointed by Washington before.  With your help, we can ensure that the GI Bill becomes law.  You can follow the new GI Bill every step of the way here.

Below is the complete list of who voted for funding the new GI Bill, and who voted against it. If you’re not sure who your Representative is, you can look them up here.

Next step: Now the bill moves on to the Senate, where a vote is scheduled for next week. Please take a minute now to call your Senators, and urge them to support the new GI Bill.