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posted September 30, 2004, updated 10:00 a.m.

Pentagon wants 'uplifting accounts' about Iraq

Administration wants upbeat reports, will 'curtail' bad news about Iraq.

by Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

Thursday morning in Baghdad multiple car bombs and rocket attacks killed at least 40 people, including many children and several US soldiers. The Bush administration, The Washington Post reports Thursday, worried that negative stories like these are dominating the news headlines during an election period, has decided to send out Iraq Americans to bring what the Defense Department calls "the good news" about the situation in Iraq to US military bases.

The Post also reports that the administration is moving to " curtail distribution" of reports that show the situation in Iraq growing worse. In particular, the US Agency of International Development said this week that it will "restrict distribution" of a report by its contractor, Kroll Security International, that showed the number of attacks by insurgents had been increasingly dramatically over the past few months. Attacks have risen to 70 a day, up from 40-50, since Iraqi Prime Minister Alawi took office in June.


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But the Guardian reports on Thursday that the Kroll documents aren't the only ones prepared by a private security contractor in Iraq that say things are getting worse.

The insurgency in Iraq appears to be more widespread and deadly than Iraqi leaders are prepared to admit, according to military officers and a report by a private security company, Special Operations Consulting-Security Management Group. The company says there have been 2,300 attacks in the past 30 days, stretching from Mosul in the north through the Sunni heartland west of Baghdad and central Shiite towns around Babylon down to Basra in the south. The weapons ranged from car and time bombs to rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades, gunfire, mortars and landmines. They averaged 80 a day.

In one sign that the administration and the military are working harder to keep a lid on negative stories, Salon reports that an Army Reserve staff sargent from Texas, with 20 years experience who is now serving in Iraq, may face up to 20 years in prison for "disloyalty and insubordination."The reason? He wrote an article criticizing the occupation of Iraq on an anti-war website, LewRockwell.com. The article contained no classified information. In his commentary, Sgt. Al Lorentz offered a "bleak assessment" of the situation.

"I have come to the conclusion that we cannot win here for a number of reasons. Ideology and idealism will never trump history and reality," wrote Lorentz, who gives four key reasons for the likely failure: a refusal to deal with reality, not understanding what motivates the enemy, an overabundance of guerrilla fighters, and the enemy's shorter line of supplies and communication.

The Christian Science Monitor reported Wednesday on life in Baghdad's "Green Zone" - home to US military and civilian officials and to the new US embassy (although its exact location has not been disclosed) - and finds that its residents are increasingly worried about their safety. One reason for their concern, the Monitor writes, is the approach of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins on Oct. 15. Last year, the month saw a dramatic surge in attacks against the "US-led military occupation."

Not all the reports that come back from Iraq are negative. North Carolina's Fayetteville Online interviews several local guardsmen who say the conditions in Iraq are improving.

"There are a few spectacular attacks that capture the TV news, but we've made steady progress," he [Brig. Gen. Danny Hickman] said. "We don't see progress day to day, but we see progress month to month."

And the Glenville Pioneer Press Online of Illinois talked to US Marine Cpl. Marine Josh Junge. While he came to realize that the US won't have 100 percent support in Iraq, it also won't have "100 percent hatred." Cpl. Junge also said he believes conditions in Iraq are slowly improving, and he supports President Bush's reasons for going to Iraq.

"I'm not a politician and the decisions aren't mine to make, but I think oftentimes our commander in chief has a much broader view of things than your average Joe who is for or against the war. We can bicker or fight about whether it's a good or bad idea," but that the president has "stood by it is pretty meritorious."

By and large, however, most reports contain a much harder assessment of the US role in Iraq and the situation there. The Toronto Star offers another grim portrait of a part of the war that rarely makes the front pages - the hospital in Germany where wounded US troops from Iraq are taken. The Star reports that "prior to the Iraq war, the hospital received no more than 10 injured US soldiers a year from conflicts. Now, it usually handles between 30 and 55 a day from Iraq and Afghanistan alone." The result, the Star reports, is that compassion fatigue is very much a problem for the staff, and anger in increasingly expressed by relatives of injured soldiers who are furious at the way they have been treated by the military.

A scathing letter about the situation in Iraq that Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi wrote to friends has become a " global chain mail" in her words. Editor and Publisher reports that her letter said that the insurgency had spread from "isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to most of Iraq."

'Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for insecurity,' Fassihi wrote (among much else) in the letter. 'Guess what? They say they'd take security over freedom any day, even if it means having a dictator ruler.' And: 'Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a "potential" threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to "imminent and active threat," a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.'

Finally, in a recent article run in numerous US, European, and Middle Eastern papers and on their websites, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, (who just returned from her second trip to Iraq) writes that the US is still without a political strategy that recognizes a "full fledged insurgency" is underway, and until it devises a strategy for the situation, "the military is forced into a stop-go-stop hesitancy in which soldiers' lives are being wasted and security continues to worsen."

What is needed is a policy that takes deadly seriously what Iraqis believe about why the war began and what the United States intends. These beliefs -- that the United States came only to get its hands on Iraq's oil, to benefit Israel's security, and to establish a puppet government and a permanent military presence through which it could control Iraq and the rest of the region -- are wrong. But beliefs passionately held are as important as facts, because they powerfully affect behavior. What we see as a tragic series of American missteps, Iraqis interpret -- with reason when seen through their eyes -- as evidence of evil intent.