"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.
Knight-Ridder has consistently done some of the best reporting in the American media on the Iraq War. If Dark Lord Dick Cheney doesn't have some secret operation going to take them over or sabotage them or something, it must be because he's too busy arranging contracts for Halliburton in the New Reconstruction on the Gulf Coast.
This is a remarkable article by Tom Lasseter that compresses an entire book's worth of analysis of what's going wrong with Bush's Excellent Adventure in Iraq: Insurgents play cat-and-mouse game with American snipers by Tom Lasseter Knight-Ridder 09/29/05.
Read the whole thing. But I'll quote a few excerpts with quotations from some of the soldiers:
"Some people don't get the gravity of the situation here; people in the Green Zone are always trying to paint a rosy picture," said Molina, a 27-year-old sniper from Clearwater, Fla. He was referring to the fortified compound in Baghdad where U.S. officials work. "These politicians are all about sending people to war but they don't know what it's all about, being over here and getting shot at, walking through s--- swamps, having bombs go off, hearing bullets fly by. They have no idea what that's like." ...
"We go out and kill the bad guys one at a time," said Hendricks, 32, who speaks with the soft accent of his native Claremore, Okla., where his high school graduating class had 55 students. "But we're just whittling down one group so it's easier for the other groups to kill them." ...
"They say attacks are down. Well, no s---," Hendricks said. "We're not patrolling where the bad guys are." ...
Hendricks taught a sniper's training course to a select group of Iraqi soldiers, but stuck to marksmanship.
"I haven't taught them tactics because they're infiltrated," Hendricks said. "It's like going to a party where you don't know anybody, but somebody in the room - you don't know who - wants to kill you." ...
Hendricks has spent eight of nine years in the military as a sniper, including five with the Army Rangers. Including his first deployment to Iraq in 2003, he's had nine confirmed kills and nine wounded.
"It takes nothing," he said with a half-grin. "I don't care about these people." ...
[Another soldier:]"The reason why they're fighting us is not Osama bin Laden. They're fighting us because we're here. ... They don't want us here. They just want us to leave. I guess that would be a victory for them," he said. "As far as I can see there's not going to be any victory for us." ...
[Another soldier:]"In past situations you've had a good guy and a bad guy and the troops were impassioned, but now troops just want to go home," Sabin said. "I don't feel like there's a cause. I don't personally think there's a reason for this."
"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05
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