Louisiana Marines Heading to Iraq Civil War

The Baton Rouge Advocate reported on Monday that 100 Marine Reservists from the Baton Rouge area shipped out for four months of training before heading to a September arrival in Iraq.

Had anyone in Louisiana's congressional delegation other than Congressman William Jefferson voted against the latest blank check for the Bush administration's war on and occupation of Iraq, those soldiers might not have had to go there, as the cut off for funding in the original bill (which was vetoed by Bush) would have cut off funding for that war/occupation at the end of September.

But, Democrats Mary Landrieu and Charlie Melancon joined other key Democrats to give Bush a victory and continue the ruinous policies that are wrecking our military and spreading Islamic terrorism around the globe.

Had congressional Democrats (and even Republicans) bothered to listen to the troops serving in Iraq, they might well have voted differently. The New York Times on Monday ran a story that included interviews with members of the 82nd Airborne Division, some of whom are on their third deployment in Iraq. Here are some quotes:

BAGHDAD — Staff Sgt. David Safstrom does not regret his previous tours in Iraq, not even a difficult second stint when two comrades were killed while trying to capture insurgents.

“In Mosul, in 2003, it felt like we were making the city a better place,” he said. “There was no sectarian violence, Saddam was gone, we were tracking down the bad guys. It felt awesome.”

But now on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomber’s body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.

“I thought: ‘What are we doing here? Why are we still here?’ ” said Sergeant Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. “We’re helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us.”

His views are echoed by most of his fellow soldiers in Delta Company, renowned for its aggressiveness.

And this:

They had seen shadowy militia commanders installed as Iraqi Army officers, they said, had come under increasing attack from roadside bombs — planted within sight of Iraqi Army checkpoints — and had fought against Iraqi soldiers whom they thought were their allies.

“In 2003, 2004, 100 percent of the soldiers wanted to be here, to fight this war,” said Sgt. First Class David Moore, a self-described “conservative Texas Republican” and platoon sergeant who strongly advocates an American withdrawal. “Now, 95 percent of my platoon agrees with me.”

It is not a question of loyalty, the soldiers insist. Sergeant Safstrom, for example, comes from a thoroughly military family. His mother and father have served in the armed forces, as have his three sisters, one brother and several uncles. One week after the Sept. 11 attacks, he walked into a recruiter’s office and joined the Army.

“You guys want to start a fight in my backyard, I got something for you,” he recalls thinking at the time.

But in Sergeant Safstrom’s view, the American presence is futile. “If we stayed here for 5, even 10 more years, the day we leave here these guys will go crazy,” he said. “It would go straight into a civil war. That’s how it feels, like we’re putting a Band-Aid on this country until we leave here.”

The change in the attitudes of the members of this unit came in an April 29 battle.

On April 29, a Delta Company patrol was responding to a tip at Al Sadr mosque, a short distance from its base. The soldiers saw men in the distance erecting barricades that they set ablaze, and the streets emptied out quickly. Then a militia, believed to be the Mahdi Army, began firing at them from rooftops and windows.

Sgt. Kevin O’Flarity, a squad leader, jumped into his Humvee to join his fellow soldiers, racing through abandoned Iraqi Army and police checkpoints to the battle site.

He and his squad maneuvered their Humvees through alleyways and side streets, firing back at an estimated 60 insurgents during a gun battle that raged for two and a half hours. A rocket-propelled grenade glanced off Sergeant O’Flarity’s Humvee, failing to penetrate.

When the battle was over, Delta Company learned that among the enemy dead were at least two Iraqi Army soldiers that American forces had helped train and arm.

Captain Rogers admits, “The 29th was a watershed moment in a negative sense, because the Iraqi Army would not fight with us,” adding, “Some actually picked up weapons and fought against us.”

The battle changed the attitude among his soldiers toward the war, he said. “Before that fight, there were a few true believers.” Captain Rogers said. “After the 29th, I don’t think you’ll find a true believer in this unit. They’re paratroopers. There’s no question they’ll fulfill their mission. But they’re fighting now for pride in their unit, professionalism, loyalty to their fellow soldier and chain of command.”

To Sergeant O’Flarity, the Iraqi security forces are militias beholden to local leaders, not the Iraqi government. “Half of the Iraqi security forces are insurgents,” he said.

As for his views on the war, Sergeant O’Flarity said, “I don’t believe we should be here in the middle of a civil war.”

“We’ve all lost friends over here,” he said. “Most of us don’t know what we’re fighting for anymore. We’re serving our country and friends, but the only reason we go out every day is for each other.”

“I don’t want any more of my guys to get hurt or die,” he continued. “If it was something I felt righteous about, maybe. But for this country and this conflict, no, it’s not worth it.”

Word has it that by the time those Louisiana Marine Reservists reach Iraq, the Bush administration will be well into a second surge that will bring a record number of U.S. combat troops into the theater there. More lives will be wasted as the Bush administration tries to run out the clock on its tenure without having to admit its failures in Iraq.

It is not just Bush and Cheney's war anymore, though. The Democrats who voted to allow continued funding of the war without any restraints on the administration now own the war, too. And they will have to answer for the lives that will be lost as a result of their votes.

On Memorial Day, the President made his annual pilgrimage to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington to honor the nation's war dead. The Washington Post included this quote in a caption that ran with the photo of him placing a wreath as part of the ceremonies:

"Now this hallowed ground receives a new generation of heroes - men and women who gave their lives in places such as Kabul and Kandahar, Baghdad and Ramadi," he said. "Like those who came before them, they did not want war, but they answered the call when it came. They believed in something larger than themselves. They fought for our country, and our country unites to mourn them as one."

No, they did not want war, but Bush and Cheney sought it. Now Democrats have made it theirs.

Washington Monthly's blog contained a link to a site with a video based on Mark Twain's "The War Prayer." Twain's text is also found there and I found it a lot more powerful than the video, but here's the relevant portion, where God's representative explains to a congregation just what their prayers for victory entail:

"You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it -- that part which the pastor -- and also you in your hearts -- fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. the *whole* of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory--*must* follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(*After a pause.*) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!"

Who will Congress and the President have die next for this mistaken war?

Smoke, Mirrors and BS

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Governor Haley "Smug" Barbour's speech at the Delta Regional Authority's Third Annual Meeting in which he extolled the virtues of Gulf Coast residents in his state, in contrast to what he saw as demeaning neediness on the part of Louisiana residents (particularly in New Orleans) in the wake of hurricane Katrina.

Well, Chris Kromm and Sue Sturgis, editors of the Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch, a project of the Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, N.C., recently published an article in Salon magazine which peels the veneer off Barbour's myth of the Mississippi Gulf Coast's self-made recovery and reveals a much starker picture of life there today. (You'll have to watch a brief ad or pay their premium to go to the Salon story).

Here are a few nuggets:

Today, Hancock County and the rest of coastal Mississippi are 21 months into a recovery that has garnered Gov. Haley Barbour lavish praise. Governing magazine named Barbour its 2006 Public Official of the Year largely due to his supposed post-Katrina leadership and savvy, including his skill in convincing federal lawmakers to channel billions of relief dollars to the Magnolia State. As Billy Hewes III, a Republican official from Gulfport, said: "He is to Katrina what Rudy Giuliani was to 9/11." Outsiders might be surprised to learn then, that despite the plaudits, and despite the fact that Barbour's GOP connections seem to have won him a disproportionate share of relief money from Washington, post-Katrina recovery in some of the hardest-hit areas of the Mississippi coast is moving as fast as molasses in winter.

In Hancock County, Rocky Pullman paints a bleak picture. The recovery is proceeding so slowly that, almost two years after the storm, most of his neighbors still can't get mail. Before Katrina, the majority of Pearlington residents used post-office boxes; but since no post offices -- or any other major city, county or school buildings in Hancock County -- have been rebuilt, they have to drive an hour round-trip to Bay St. Louis to pick up a letter.

Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee with close ties to the Bush administration, has definitely proved more successful than his maligned Louisiana counterpart, Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco, in one respect: lobbying Washington for cash. In fact, Barbour's ability to steer a lopsided share of Katrina money to Mississippi has touched off a firestorm of outrage in Louisiana, which suffered considerably more destruction from the storm.

Consider the Gulf Coast housing crisis, one of the key issues that has kept nearly half the population of New Orleans from returning to the city since Katrina. More than 75 percent of the housing damage from the storm was in Louisiana, but Mississippi has received 70 percent of the funds through FEMA's Alternative Housing Pilot Program. Of the $388 million available, FEMA gave a Mississippi program offering upgraded trailers more than $275 million. Meanwhile, the agency awarded Louisiana's "Katrina Cottage" program, which features more permanent modular homes for storm victims, a mere $75 million.

It's not just housing. Mississippi is also slated to get 38 percent of federal hospital recovery funds, even though it lost just 79 beds compared to 2,600 lost in southern Louisiana, which will get 45 percent of the funds. Mississippi and Louisiana both received $95 million to offset losses in higher education, even though Louisiana was home to 75 percent of displaced students. The states also received $100 million each for K-12 students affected by the storms, despite the fact that 69 percent resided in Louisiana.

The disparity between the states' needs and the funding they received from Washington has been so glaring that even disgraced former FEMA director Michael Brown recently charged that politics played a role. "Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking we had to federalize Louisiana because she's a white, female Democratic governor and we have a chance to rub her nose in it," Brown told students at Metropolitan College of New York in January.

You know it's bad when even a cronyism legacy like "Brownie" grasps the partisan nature of the recovery 'effort.'

Think about this for a minute in the context of what we've learned in recent weeks about the Bush administration's efforts to politicize the operation of the General Services Administration, the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, FEMA — well, suffice it to say that the list goes on. Given that context, it should come as no surprise that the recovery process has been politicized, as well,and that Louisiana (and Governor Blanco) have paid a high price for that.

As anyone living in New Orleans will tell you, while this blatant partisanship has been the hallmark of the federal effort, Republicans in Louisiana have been quick to proclaim their commitment to a non-partisan recovery (at least until the statewide election season opened Bobby "The Opportunist" Jindal decided to make the Road Home Program funding his issue).

So, back to Mississippi Governor Smug:

For the residents of Hancock County, Barbour and Mississippi's ability to capture the lion's share of Katrina relief dollars makes the slow progress in their area all the more demoralizing. The county's 911 system still operates out of a trailer. Damaged wastewater and drainage systems frustrate hopes of a return to normalcy; earlier this month in Waveland, 16 miles east of Pearlington, a 9-and-a-half-foot alligator was found swimming in a drainage ditch next to a bus stop at 8 o'clock in the morning. Mayor Tommy Longo says the creatures freely roam throughout devastated residential areas.

Indeed, Hancock County was one of three Gulf Coast areas recently singled out as having "severe problems" by the Rockefeller Institute on Government and the Louisiana Public Affairs Council, with the towns of Waveland and Bay St. Louis flat-out "struggling to survive."

Most important, Hancock leaders say, Mississippi leaders and their federal allies have failed to use their clout to tackle some of the most obvious barriers to rebuilding.

One of those barriers was the Stafford Act requirement that local governments put up a 25 percent match for disaster relief money. Governor Blanco and Senator Landrieu made getting Louisiana communities exempted from the Act their top personal priority. They succeeded. Mississippi communities will now benefit from their efforts. No doubt, Barbour will claim the credit.

Barbour continues to ignore the plight of struggling communities, while taking credit (at least in the speech he gave to the DRA) for the state government surplus and the economic surge that is taking place in other communities in the state:

Parts of Mississippi are doing much better than Hancock County. The Rockefeller Institute report found that recovery "is well underway" in Biloxi, Gulfport and Pascagoula, and that there's actually been a post-Katrina economic boom in Jackson, Hattiesburg and Laurel.

And thanks to the economic boost in certain areas, Mississippi is now looking at a windfall in tax revenues. For the first six months of the 2007 budget year, general fund revenues were up 12.7 percent, and the Mississippi Legislative Budget Committee and the governor recently increased the estimate for the 2007 budget from $4.5 billion to nearly $4.7 billion, which means the state has an extra $192.7 million thanks to higher-than-expected tax collections largely from Katrina spending.

But under Barbour's leadership, the state has been unwilling to use its good fortune to help debt-ridden towns -- and some are at risk of going under.

Yep. Communities in Mississippi are at risk of going under. Listening to Barbour talk, you'd have thought that this kind of thing could only happen in Louisiana.

That's his story and he's sticking to it. Just like Republicans in Louisiana are claiming that the problems with the recovery in the Katrina and Rita affected areas are Blanco's fault.

Nothing like folks who won't let the facts get in the way of a good argument.

Blood Money

The new blank check that Democrats in the U.S. House and Senate gave to the Bush administration this week to continue the occupation of Iraq contains money and write-offs for storm-affected areas of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. Members of Louisiana's congressional delegation would have us believe that this is some great victory for the state.

It is not.

It is blood money.

It is the craven attempt of two of Louisiana's three congressional Democrats to provide some semblance respectability for their assumption of joint-ownership of the national disaster that is the occupation of Iraq. Democrats who voted for the supplemental appropriation for the war are now co-owners of the policy choices that are wrecking the Army.

Republicans like Senator David Vitter and Congressman/compulsive candidate Bobby Jindal took ownership of this war long-ago. Democrats in Louisiana ought to have expected more out of Senator Mary Landrieu and Congressman Charlie Melancon on this war; after all, Louisiana has paid a very steep price for this war in terms of lives lost in this war that was based on lies. That does not even bring into account the cost storm-ravaged Louisiana paid in 2005 when so much of our National Guard's equipment was in Iraq instead of being put to use in rescue and recovery efforts here. It also was revealed this week that the Bush administration had been warned by the CIA about the hazards of invading Iraq.

For the first three years of this war and occupation, the Republican-controlled Congress did nothing to hold the Bush administration accountable for its policies in Iraq. With this vote, many Democrats have demonstrated that they are no more committed to accountability than the Republicans were.

It has become clear that the Bush administration has used the pretext of this war of choice as the basis to subvert constitutional law in this country, to violate civil liberties with impunity, and to abandon the rule of law. Democrats who voted to allow this occupation to continue without restraint have signed on to this process. Like the President, they have now violated the Constitution that their oaths of office committed them to defend and protect.

With this vote to continue funding the occupation of Iraq without any restraints on the administration's policies, Democrats have spent whatever moral and political capital they had won by posing as strong opponents of the administration's policies in Iraq. If Democrats cannot stand up to this administration now when nearly 80 percent of the country thinks we're on the wrong track, when almost 2/3 of the people believe going to war was a mistake, when will they have the courage and conviction to do so?

Democratic voters need to wise up. This vote demonstrates that the presence of a "D" behind a candidate's name cannot be sufficient justification for support. Senator Landrieu and Congressman Melancon will run in party primaries in 2008. I hope members of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party will have the courage to challenge Landrieu and Melancon in those 2008 primaries in order to force them to account for the votes they just cast in support of this war.

Ask Landrieu and Melancon how they can justify asking our men and women in the armed forces to continue dying for a mistake.