"The killing of innocent civilians is policy", Iraq war veteran Mike Blake told a public meeting held on January 19 at the Different Drummer Cafe in Watertown, New York State, near the Canadian border.
"It's unit policy and it's Army policy. It's not official policy, but it's what's happens on the ground everyday. It's what unit commanders individually encourage."
Iraq war veteran Matt Howard concurred: "These decisions are coming from the top down", he said. "The tactics that we use, the policies that the military engages, will create situations, create dynamics, create — ultimately — atrocity."
Blake and Howard were among four Iraq war veterans who spoke at the Watertown event. Their remarks were reported later that day on 24-hour cable TV news channel News 10 Now.
The channel reported that the four veterans, "part of the national organisation called Iraq Veterans Against War, are planning an event to be held in Washington, DC, this coming March called 'Winter Soldier' that will have veterans all speaking about war crimes they committed or witnessed during their tours of duty ... IVAW hopes to have 100 veterans speak at the event. Once it ends, they'll document the testimony and package it for Congress."
Watertown, with 27,000 residents, is the nearest large town to Fort Drum, home of the US Army's 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry), and is the principal service and shopping destination for the fort's 12,000 personnel.
Over the last decade, this infantry division, which is designed for rapid deployment anywhere in the world, has been involved in more foreign deployments than any other in the US Army. During 2007, about 7000 of its soldiers were deployed in Iraq, mainly to the oil-rich, mixed Arab-Kurd, Kirkuk region of northern Iraq. Another 3200 "Mountain Warriors" were deployed in Afghanistan.
News 10 Now reported that "IVAW says it expects a number of veterans from Fort Drum to be at the event and it is hoping to get more veterans to attend and speak at the event and will help pay for any active duty soldier who wants to go and listen".
US troop deaths
In the first three weeks of this year, 26 US troops died in Iraq, reversing the downward trend in monthly US combat deaths that occurred second half of 2007. In December, 23 US troops died in Iraq — the lowest number of any month in the war since February 2004 (when only 20 US troops died).
The Pentagon has attributed to the big reduction in monthly US troop fatalities in the second half of 2007 to its troop "surge" strategy, announced by US President George Bush last January. However, the proclaimed goal of the surge, which added an extra 30,000 troops to the 132,000-strong US occupation force, was to defeat and disarm what US commanders called "sectarian militias", meaning the Sunni-based anti-occupation guerrillas and the Mahdi Army militia of of anti-occupation Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr.
The US military attempted to do this by dividing Baghdad's 6 million residents into Sunni and Shiite ghettos, surrounded by 4-metre high concrete walls, and then, in April, May and June, carrying out large-scale attacks on these ghettos. These assaults led to the highest level of US troop deaths in any three-month period of the war, with more than 100 US soldiers dying in each of the those months.
In May, 126 US troops died, a monthly record only exceeded by the US combat death totals of April and November 2004, when 135 and 137 US troops died respectively during the large-scale US military assaults on the city of Fallujah — then controlled by anti-occupation resistance forces.
The decline in monthly US troop deaths since August — when 84 US troops died — has largely been a result of US commanders abandoning this strategy of "surging" large numbers of US troops into Baghdad's Sunni and Shiite ghettoised neighbourhoods.
Instead, US commanders have concentrated on more limited operations in more sparsely populated areas to "hunt down" the widely despised Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) group, which the mainstream Iraqi resistance has been fighting since early 2006.
Air strikes
In these more limited "anti-AQI" operations, US commanders have increasingly relied on air power rather than assaults by ground troops. The January 17 Washington Post reported that the "US military conducted more than five times as many air strikes in Iraq last year as it did in 2006 ... The US-led coalition dropped 1447 bombs on Iraq last year, an average of nearly four a day, compared with 229 bombs, or about four each week, in 2006."
The January 20 Post reported that the "jump in air strikes appears to have played a vital role in both reducing US casualties in recent months and helping disrupt and demoralize insurgents, military officials say".
However, the only evidence that US military officials cite to support their claim that the mainstream Iraqi resistance fighters are "demoralised" is the reduction in the level of Iraqi resistance's attacks on US troops since June.
This has been seized on by some US politicians to claim that Washington's war in Iraq has "turned the corner" toward "military success". Speaking to NBC News on January 22, General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, dismissed such claims as totally unfounded: "We have repeatedly said that there is no light at the end of the tunnel ... We're certainly not dancing in the end zone or anything like that."
Plummeting morale
While there is no credible evidence of demoralisation among the Iraqi resistance fighters, there is evidence — from US soldiers themselves — that demoralisation among their ranks is "disrupting" the Pentagon's counter-insurgency war, contributing to lower US casualty levels.
Last October, Inter Press Service (IPS) journalist Dahr Jamail reported that Iraq war veterans stationed at Fort Drum had told him that morale among US soldiers in Iraq "is so poor, many are simply parking their Humvees and pretending to be on patrol, a practice dubbed 'search and avoid' missions".
According to the US-based ICasualties website, 92 soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division have died in the Iraq war. The division's Iraq death toll was three in 2003, 12 in 2004, 10 in 2005 and 20 in 2006. But in 2007, 47 "Mountain Warriors" died in Iraq, mostly from roadside bombs.
Phil Aliff, an active-duty soldier with the division, who had returned to Fort Drum only three weeks earlier from a tour of duty in Iraq's Kirkuk region after several tours in Afghanistan, told IPS that his platoon had been "hit by so many roadside bombs, we became incredibly demoralised. So we decided the only way we wouldn't be blown up was to avoid driving around all the time.
"So we would go find an open field and park, and call our base every hour to tell them we were searching for weapons caches in the fields and doing weapons patrols and everything was going fine."
Eli Wright, a 26-year-old medic with the division, told IPS: "We'd go to the end of our patrol route and set up on top of a bridge and use it as an over-watch position. We would just sit with our binoculars and observe rather than sweep. We'd call in radio checks every hour and say we were doing sweeps." Wright added: "It was a common tactic, a lot of people did that. We'd just hang out, listen to music, smoke cigarettes, and pretend" to patrol.
Geoff Millard, a US Army National Guard soldier who was in Iraq for 12 months from October 2004 working for a general at a tactical operation centre, told IPS. "One of my buddies is in Baghdad right now and we email all the time. He just told me that nearly each day they pull into a parking lot, drink soda and shoot at the cans. They pay Iraqi kids to bring them things and spread the word that they are not doing anything and to please just leave them alone."